Emergency Help Needed!!!

T

TheDarkTao

Gawd
Joined
Feb 5, 2005
Messages
800
Ok guys a little bit of history, I had a ASUS p5n-e (650i) board. Nothing but problems on 3 different mobos (1 return 1 rma) and finally my last one started dying (shitty clocks, random lock ups etc..) and died late last night. So I went out and got a gigabyte p35-ds3r and seems to be a great board and what no... But now I have ever computer owners worst nightmare

I have quite a serious problem now... I got into windows, had to reinstall some drivers, but it all worked fine. Only problem is since I was using nvidia raid, I now used the gigabyte version... So I used my same two 500gig drives and tryed to use the build in raid from the gigabyte board, and for some reason now my 74gig raptor (OS drive) and both 500gig drives show as if the are new and formated (no I did not format) I think I totally fucked up


I thought I could just make a new raid array out of the drives and it would work fine. Or at least the C driver would not be affected. But for some reason they all show as if they are new and have no data on the. I have pictures, important ones of family and friends that I only had backed up on the raid array, and many business files, videos, music, and of course my hours into bioshock save files


In all seriousness I am totally panicing, just imagine losing EVERYTHING on your comp, and both your back-up drives!


I tryed running repair from the vista CD but no good. Does anyone have any idea of what might help!!! I could really use some help. I cannot figure out what to do, this is a total fucking nightmare... O that ASUS I will definately use your boards again
 
Would trying to put the drives into another computer with vista installed be a good idea, I could could re-assign drive letters? Or could it hurt at least maybe I can get some data out :(


PLease, and help is sooo appreciated, I am on almost 8 hours of working with this :(
 
Download Knoppix, burn it to a CD and boot from it. Check the Raptor drive if it still has files on it. Are you sure you didn't reformat it?

Did you try to boot from Raptor drive without the two 500GB drives connected?

And as I understand it, the mobo has to have the same RAID chip as your previous mobo in order to recover a RAID setup. So you may have reformatted those two 500GB drives when you setup the Gigabyte RAID. Also, when your mobo died, it may have corrupted or even wiped out everything stored in your RAID setup.
 
This is part of the reason a RAID is NOT a back-up...

Most RAID controllers leave some sort of RAID array config data on your drive... While this is great in the event that the controller dies, your array does not die, as you just grab a new controller, put the drives on, and your array is good-to-go again... (I think on my 3ware cards I lose around 7MB of drive space to this config data...)

But what this also means is if I put the drive(s) on any controller that does not identify the drive as part of a RAID set, it's not going to see the drive is full of data... I'd imagine it's going to see the drive as your new controller now sees your: BLANK! (or just give a WTF is this drive? response, I'd imagine...)

Either way, this little bit of storing array config data on your drive means a single disk no longer can just act as a single disk anymore.

I don't have time to read through the manuals, but a quick glance at drivers for both mobos made it look like different drivers... So, different RAID chipsets?

If so, I doubt they'd talk like one another. Which leaves you where you are. Your original arrays not recognized by the new controller.

Was your back-up saved on a raid array? If yes, don't do that! (if not, then I don't understand why your back-up is not available...)

But yes, I like add-in RAID controllers for critical stuff as then I don't need to worry about the mobo dying, just put the controller in the new mobo... If the controller dies, just use a new controller... (I even keep a spare...)

Your data's probably not toast by connecting the drives to the new controller, BUT, if you established in the BIOS of the new RAID controller a new array on the drives (hard to tell if that's what you might have done), then your data's probably lightly toasted, as there's a good chance the array config data from your old controller might have gotten blown away in that process...

(I'm hoping the above is not what you did, and that you only connected the drives to the new controller, and the new controller just doesn't recognize the drives as an array?)

If you haven't toasted the data, the best option is to be certain to get a mobo with the exact same RAID controller on it... That's the closest to a guarantee that I can offer...

(actually, the best option is to have replaced the mobo with the exact same mobo...)

But, no offense, if you have lost all of your data and your back-up data in this process, you need to re-think your back-up strategy in the future...

NO ONE LIKES TO LOSE THEIR DATA... I do sympathize... (which is why I want to help...)
 
Danny Bui said:
And as I understand it, the mobo has to have the same RAID chip as your previous mobo in order to recover a RAID setup. So you may have reformatted those two 500GB drives when you setup the Gigabyte RAID. Also, when your mobo died, it may have corrupted or even wiped out everything stored in your RAID setup.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, the two boards do have the same RAID chipset?

If yes, that's good...

But if you re-established a new RAID array on the drives, you blew away the config data of the old array, essentially doing a quick format of the drives...

Data's still there, but for lack of a better way to put it this early in the morning, your index for it all is gone...
 
Ok it was in raid 1 not raid 0, isn't the point of raid 1 so that if one driver fails you have a backup???

I did something stupid it looks, I tryed to make a new raid array on the gigabyte board. So that messes up the index huh? Is there a way to fix that? :confused:

If I had to get another p5n-e I could. But isn't raid 1 different that way? Shouldn't it being raid 1 still allow me to get at my data...

And what about the main drive? I realized I always had to set up my two raid drives (shows as one raid array) as the first option to boot, because for some reason vista liked it that way. Could that be why I cannot see the C drive? That drive does not has never been used for raid.

So that data and indexing should be intact right? The data was there for a while on the gigabyte board, and windows worked fine till I tryed to set the two 500gig drives into raid again (so yes the worked as two independant 500gig drives before the format with all data in tact) it was only after I tried to turn them back into a raid array I lost data.

The C drive should be fine no?
 
I just checked out how vista does booting. And since the 500gis needed to be booted from first or C (the raptor) was not recognized. So it has something to do with how vista boots, and for some reason it would only boot from the 500 gigs even though the OS was on the 74 (I don't know why, its a vista thing)

So would that be why I lost the C drive as well as the raided ones?

So all the data, if that is correct is still on C in tact correct?

BTW Thank you all soooo much.... Seriously I appreciate it. It is 4am and I just cant sleep with all this, fucking sucks.
 
Sounds like the new mobo has the drives booting in the opposite order... It's not a Vista thing, it's a mobo thing...

See if you can set the boot order in the mobo BIOS, or which controller to boot from first...

(basically, it is seeing the 500GBers before seeing the Raptor... It's needs to see the Raptor first...)

But yes, while it sounds nice to have security with putting a back-up on a RAID, if you cannot access the RAID, you now have two identical disks that you cannot get data off of. You need an identical controller, or one that supports the previous config.

But yes, you should have just taken the drives off the other RAID controller, and tried them as-is on the new one. If you in any way re-established a new RAID array on the new controller, you may very well have blown away the array config.

Only way to be sure is to plug them back into a controller that supports the previous config.

BUT, BUT... If you system just isn't booting because it is seeing the 500GBers before the Raptor, and is just not seeing an OS to boot off of, then just having the mobo boot off the Raptor first might be the entire solution to all of this. All of your data might be A-okay, just it attempts to boot off the 500GB array, sees no OS, and does nothing...

That's my optimistic viewpoint anyway, with fingers crossed for ya!

(assuming you have the drives now on two different controllers, trying to boot from the RAID controller first makes sense, as most would want their boot drive to be the one that has redundancy...)

(And, looking at above, you have your strategy backwards, and the mobos default also suggests this... Most would have their boot drive RAIDed, so downtimes doesn't happen with it, then the back-up is on a single drive that is kept single, so it is accessible from any system in any config in the future... I am not criticizing you, just pointing out how to keep your data from being inaccessible...)

(Also, to note: I work in a data center; I am responsible for daily back-ups on multiple servers. On a weekend alone, I am responsible for maintaining and tracking roughly 60TBs of data... I can tell you right now, that a back-up strategy is pointless if you ever render the back-up data inaccessible... I know it is not cost-effective for an end user like yourself with a single desktop, but not only do you potentially need redundancy on your data (your second raid drive), but if you raid the back-up like that, you need redundancy on the controller of those drives...)

(Simply put, a two-drive back-up is twice as good, but for what you are doing, save the data twice to two totally separate drives then... I might even recommend using some sort of parity strategy like Quickpar... That way you can have sectors go bad on both disks (which RAID _CANNOT_ and _WILL NOT_ help you with here!), and still re-build your data!)

(I use quickpar (or similar) for all of my digital media back-ups... one disc has data, the other disc is ONLY parity of the first disc... That way half of both discs can go bad on me, but I can still get enough data off of both discs to repair my data!)

(While a 500GB drive is bigger than an optical disc, don't snort at my suggestion here before checking out a parity back-up option and considering it, PLEASE! Like I said, this option will allow both 500GB drive to go fairly bad on you WITHOUT you losing ANY of your data! Like I said, _NO_ level of RAID can do this... well, at least no RAID implemented in real time... What I am suggesting is MUCH MUCH different than parity RAID-5... MUCH different...)

(To quickly explain, RAID-5 will allow you to lose a drive... One you lose sectors on two discs simultaneously, you have SOME lost data... It's gone... the parity solution I am suggesting allows you to lose a sector at a time, and only need potentially a sector of parity data to fix it... It's a long, CPU-intensive process potentially, mind you, which is why raid controllers don't implement this type of strategy for real-time use...)

But my back-up parity suggestion allow much more flexibility for media that goes bad to still have benefit in restoring ALL of your data...

If this bored you, I apologize... I just hate for anyone to lose their data!!! (and, believe me, RAID-1/5/6/10 are about helping to keep downtime from happening, not about data back-up and data security!)
 
Only problem is since I was using nvidia raid, I now used the gigabyte version...
Click to expand...
The GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R has two raid controllers. The two purple SATA jacks are for the Gigabyte raid controller and the remaining six yellow-orange jacks are for the Intel raid controller. Swapping your RAID array will not work.
 
I tried the raid drives on both controllers. I tried MANY times setting the 500s first then the raptor first... To no avail.


Ok I think I figured out where the problem lies.

At one point, the gigabyte controller had a "rebuild raid array" option. I chose raid one, and plugged the drives in and it "rebuilt them" in the description of the folder, it said the option could rebuild damaged or swaped raid drives to function again. It was a long and very slow process that took hours. I think that may have been what has done them in :eek: I think it may have formatted or something like that since it took so long :mad: If that is the case, I am hella pissed at gigabyte for falsely stating what a program does. But I always should have looked this up before hand so I am an idiot too :(

So I think the 500s may be gone. I took off raid just now on the gigabyte board (forgot to do that) lets hope my other comp can read them so I can get data off.

Can you plug in a SATA drive while a computer is on?
 
TheDarkTao said:
I tried the raid drives on both controllers. I tried MANY times setting the 500s first then the raptor first... To no avail.
Can you plug in a SATA drive while a computer is on?
Click to expand...

Yes, SATA is hot-swappable.
 
I ran file scavanger on my C: drive the raptor, and nothing came back... Am I fucked? :(

How could all the data on the drive have been erased? How is that even possible? To format 70 gigs takes time, there was never a point the comp was on that long... What could have happend....

Is there any last ditch effort I could make :confused:
 
HUGE UPDATE!!!!


THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOOTTTTt :) :D :cool:



One of the 500gig drives has ALL the data... apperently gigabyte board put all the files onto one of the 500 gig drives, I just happend to be looking into the wrong one!

File scavanger found it all!!! Is there a program out there that will pull all the data off the drive and copy it exactlly? This would be a huge help is someone know. Only program I found is scavanger iteself which is over 100 dollars :eek: Anyone know of another?
 
TheDarkTao said:
Someone else said that. How does it work?
Click to expand...

I was the one that said it earlier. LOL!

Well basically you can use Knoppix to browse the contents of that 500GB hard drive and then move it over another hard drive. Usually Knoppix mounts all the hard drive it finds, making it easier to find and locate files. It's really not that hard to figure out once you're booted in/up.

In case you didn't figure it out, Knoppix is a Linux OS designed to run entirely from CD.
 
Ok, so the files that file scavanger found I should be able to pull off using knopixx?
Click to expand...
Yes, IF it can 'see' the files, you can move/copy them anywhere you want.
 
Bad news!!! knoppix only supports IDE cd drives... I have an SATA drive, and it keeps giving me an error (at least when I looked up the error code, that appears to be the issue)

Any other suggestions :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top