Help with disk boot failure and mft corruption with raid 1

[Waterhazard]

Any help would be much appreciated!
I'm not very familiar with raid setups but heres whats going on:

An old friend of mine set up a raid 1 mirror with two Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KD 400GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drives with a DFI RS482 INFINITY 939 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Micro ATX AMD MB for my father 2 years ago. It has been completely problem free until this week. It gives the error:
“Verifying DMI Pool Data…..
DISK BOOT FAILURE,INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER”
along with a $mft error.

I'm no pro but that mft error seems to be a very bad thing and I'm feeling pretty bad telling my old man that his plethora of family pictures that he holds so dear may be gone after assuring him that a raid 1 was the way to go.


Not knowing exactly how raid 1 works or if it mirrors the boot sector and file table, I switched the boot order to the other disk and just got an endless reboot loop.
I tried to plug both drives into another machine of mine and after a lengthly bootup process my comp will eventually hang before I can access the folders or run a scan or defrag while giving the "delayed write failed" message bubble several times.

In an attempt to just recover the data iff the disks I tried to boot to the XP install CD and run the recovery utility and about 1 out of 10 times I can get the machine to even recognize that the drive exists, but even when it does, it hangs endlessly at the first step.

I thought raid 1 was a foolproof way to at LEAST protect data. What am I doing wrong?

If ANYONE has any advice on how to recover his family memories I would be most appreciative.

 

[DonDon]

Oh no, here we go again.

First of all, a RAID 1 array is not the equivalent to an offline backup or 4 of your data. When you run RAID 1, if something external to your raid array causes a problem, the problem is dutifully spread across both copies of your data. Such as a power glitch or a virus infection.

That being said (again and again,) if you take one of the RAID 1 drives, and plug it into a system with a working boot drive, then you should be able to access most, if not all of the data on the drive. If only the Windows boot files were hosed, then the rest of the data on the drive may still be intact on at least one of the 2 volumes of the RAID array.

In the future, the only way to ensure access to your data in the future is to have at least a couple of copies of the data external to the computer. USB drives are the easiest way these days to accomplish that.

Don

/edit on/ Raid 1 does not protect data. It merely increases the online availability of the data.

 

[pug71]

These post are becoming a theme.. People seem to don't get they MUST have a backup of their data when running RAID.

 

[Waterhazard]

These post are becoming a theme.. People seem to don't get they MUST have a backup of their data when running RAID.

pug71, although your exquisitely crafted one line reply is infinitely helpful with my problem, do you have any other suggestions on how to restore the data?

DonDon, I did plug both of the drives separately into a machine with a working boot drive, this is where I got the delayed write errors and an inevitable lockup after about 60 seconds. It also would rarely even detect the disk in the recovery utility, and when it did it would promptly lockup. Do you know of any programs that might be able to help me?

Thanks again.

 

[fugu]

Try hooking one of them up to another machine with a USB adapter

 

[Waterhazard]

Thanks fugu, I'll give that a try.

 

[DonDon]

pug71, although your exquisitely crafted one line reply is infinitely helpful with my problem, do you have any other suggestions on how to restore the data?

DonDon, I did plug both of the drives separately into a machine with a working boot drive, this is where I got the delayed write errors and an inevitable lockup after about 60 seconds. It also would rarely even detect the disk in the recovery utility, and when it did it would promptly lockup. Do you know of any programs that might be able to help me?

Thanks again.

What data recovery program are you refering to? Nevermind, I reread your original post.

I would try getting the diagnostic utility from the WDC website. Go to the support section and get the DOS version that boots from a CD. Run the complete or long test.

It almost sounds like you have developed hardware problems on both drives at the same time. (Power glitch?) While I have not had to try to recover data in your situation for a long time, the utility I remember seeing mentioned quite a bit is Spinrite.

Don

 

[Waterhazard]

DonDon, Spinrite was exactly what I needed, since it allowed me to make a boot disk to the utility. It recognized the drives and attempted to fix them. Unfortunately it wasn't able to save the HDs as they both gave out completely during the recovery process (Spinrite warned that they might not survive the rigors of recovery since they were in such bad shape).
Thanks again for the suggestion, I will definitely keep that program around, it has some useful maintenance functions as well.

Oh, and I ordered the Old Man a nice external HD dock for backup on his machine

 

[Waterhazard]

Also, what backup program would you recommend? I would like to put something like Acronis on, that would allow him to one touch backup his data and outlook, itunes, etc, then disconnect the drive until its time to backup again.

 

[DonDon]

I personally use Syncback SE. It is pretty full featured for my needs.

Don

 

[Waterhazard]

I personally use Syncback SE. It is pretty full featured for my needs.

Don

That seens to be a great utility DonDon, and it looks like it does just about everything...but there might be a little too much complexity for my father. Is the "simple" mode really simple? ie one touch backup?