Need a RAID de-striper for recovery work

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CrashGawker

Gawd
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May 30, 2002
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I'm trying to recover a RAID array consisting of a pair of 250GB Hitachi SATAs that I had configured on my old system (that died) using the motherboards onboard RAID controller. I tried hooking it up to my NEW system and simply recreating the array but that didn't work. Then I tried Runtime's RAID Reconstructor (which ran for 27 hours) only to run GetDataBack on it and not be able to recover a damn thing!!

GDB can SEE lots of my files but when I try to open them (either through GDB or after recovery) they are corrupt. Most of the stuff is video files for home videos and stuff that I really don't want to lose.

Put simply I have a pair of 250GB drives that were originally in a striped array that I can no longer use but I want to recover the data. What tools can I use and are there some guides for it? I didn't like the RAID reconstructor because it gives several options for de-striping and "suggests" you use a certain one but since I don't know data recovery I don't know WTF any of it means.
 
First thing is that you should not have recreated the array on the new system. Depending on what the new system does when creating a raid array depends on if your files are corrupted or not.

Would be helpful to know the make/model of the previous and new motherboards along with what *exactly* you did and when to determine how viable your data may be.
 
Yeah I made some rookie mistakes because I don't really know what I'm doing. Guess I should have come and asked the masters in the first place but unfortunately I didn't think about it.

Old board was Chaintech Zenith Ultra 7NJS, new board is a Asus K8N-E Deluxe. I created a new array and that was pretty much it. I've changed recovery software and ran a partial scan using R-Studio that was able to successfully recover some of my files. Currently running a complete scan using the same that should HOPEFULLY be finished tonight after I get off work or tomorrow morning. Once that scan is complete I'll have a better idea of what will or won't be recoverable in the drives current state. Let me know if there's other info I can find to help you guys figure out a better method of recovery.
 
Those two boards have completely different raid subsystems, you basically ruined your chances of recovery
 
Well I think you are mistaken considering the glowing results of my partial scan but we'll see later tonight when I get home from work. The complete scan should be done by then and we'll be able to see for sure what can and can't be recovered. Rest assured that I won't be using any form of RAID once this recovery is finished. It's just too risky and the benfits are negligable in light of how things have gone for me this time. Normally by the time something would crash the chances of buying the same thing to replace it are almost nil considering that there will be newer better technology available and in the case of the fried motherboard I wasn't even able to buy a replacement unit because the technology wasn't new anymore. All in all RAID sounded like a good idea at the time but I think it's extremely overrated.
 
well if you want to slim your chances of losing data then run them mirrored so that way you will have a backup
 
Unfortunately I'm having enough trouble coming up with the money to buy enough hard drives just to consolidate my stuff to this one computer. A mirrored set would be ANOTHER $1,000 that I don't really have. I think I'll just stick to using individual drives like I did before I tried RAID and start doing a better job of keeping burned backups.
 
R5 is the cheapest fault redundant high capacity method you can get. Single drives are a PITA but slightly cheaper. R1 is totally fault intollerant, and R1 is twice as expensive as it needs to be for the capacity. (I may be biased ;) )
 
CrashGawker said:
Unfortunately I'm having enough trouble coming up with the money to buy enough hard drives just to consolidate my stuff to this one computer. A mirrored set would be ANOTHER $1,000 that I don't really have. I think I'll just stick to using individual drives like I did before I tried RAID and start doing a better job of keeping burned backups.
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$1000 for 2 250s? Where are you shopping?!

snyper238: Striping versus mirroring won't make any difference when you move from one controller to another.

 
unhappy_mage said:
snyper238: Striping versus mirroring won't make any difference when you move from one controller to another.
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huh? R1 is transferable (just recreate using data from one drive.) R0 is, AFAIK, untransferable.
 
GLSauron said:
huh? R1 is transferable (just recreate using data from one drive.) R0 is, AFAIK, untransferable.
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What if one controller puts metadata on the beginning of the disk, and the other stores it in flash or at the end of the disk? All three are reasonable places to put it, so if one manufacturer does it differently than the other you're out of luck.

If you're talking about breaking the array, moving one disk to the new machine, re-creating a raid 1 array, reformatting and copying the data over network, yes, you could do that. But it's not gauranteed that the on-disk format is the same. Heck, your controller could store the data logically backwards - write to the first block on the array and it goes to the last block on the disk. That'd be tricky to keep straight, but there's no reason you couldn't do it.

 
You might be able to recover small files as in stuff that's smaller than the striping block (usually 64kb or 128kb). But if you hooked up the drives and 'recreated' the array on a different controller, you probably just cleared both drives. Just my 2 cents.
 
Well this is one time I'm ecstatic to inform the gurus here at the [H] that you are wrong. Maybe not in theory but in this particular instance you were incorrect. So far I have pulled over 220GB of viable data off of the original pair of drives. Plenty more still coming so we'll see what the end results are but even at around 50% recovered I'm happy enough with the save to call it a success.

unhappy_mage: That was my mistake...my ACTUAL drive space is over 2TB. It just so happens that this post was only regarding around 465GB of it. The rest of my storage is spread over 15 IDE hard drives ranging in size from 120GB to 200GB. My end goal is to replace ALL of the lower capacity hard drives with 500GB SATA drives which at the current market lowball of $200/e comes to about $1K. Therefore to mirror I'd have to have double the drives which'd be another $1K plus I'd need to buy a secondary SATA controller because my motherboard only supports 6.

To keep discussion going though...I'm still curious about RAID I just feel like I did it poorly. What's the new RAID5 you guys are talking about? How's it work what kind of space can I get with a safety net etc?
 
CrashGawker said:
Well this is one time I'm ecstatic to inform the gurus here at the [H] that you are wrong. Maybe not in theory but in this particular instance you were incorrect. So far I have pulled over 220GB of viable data off of the original pair of drives. Plenty more still coming so we'll see what the end results are but even at around 50% recovered I'm happy enough with the save to call it a success.
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Nice to hear you have recovered some of your information, but you need to clarify your statement about "gurus" since only *ONE* poster made a definitive statement that you lost your data.

There is always the potential to recover some data, but again that depends highly on the exact components you are working with as well as the exact steps you took when transferring the hard drives to your new system.


CrashGawker said:
To keep discussion going though...I'm still curious about RAID I just feel like I did it poorly. What's the new RAID5 you guys are talking about? How's it work what kind of space can I get with a safety net etc?
Click to expand...

Raid 5 is not new, spend some time reading over about RAID and the different levels available.
 
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