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RAID 1 failure, need help recovering data

W

Wraithblade

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 20, 2001
Messages
323
The RAID 1 in my work's single office machine was having a few issues, and when I attempted to rebuild the array from the disk it was indicating was good, the whole thing failed. I've been spending the last two days trying to get usable data off the drives (using pcinspector primarily), with little success. Everything I've retrieved so far has been thoroughly corrupted, with nothing but the filename recognizeable. (I retrieved almost a gig of files I thought were good, only to find out they're garbage).

There are no visible partitions on the drives, and most of what I can view with pcinspector has been corrupted. I would appreciate any tips, hints, prayers, and voodoo magic you can toss my way.

Of course, they didn't do any of the backups I told them on several occasions to do, and I assumed they had bothered to save their precious data in more than one location. So naturally, I touched it, and it broke. :(

edit: Oh yeah, and pcinspector is crashing sometimes when attempting to recover data, usually with a (something) access error. Of course I've been doing this for two days straight and I'm too tired to remember exactly what the error is. I'll post it once I encounter it again.
 
Bleh, I must be tired if I forgot to mention that.

It's IDE, using a cheap raid card. I believe the chip on the card was made by Silicon Image.
 
Have you tried to recover off these drive in a seperate computer? I've got a feeling the corruption was incremental over time and probably due to a memory error. That can be tested for in the suspect machine with memtest86+ and a few other diagnostics. If there is bad memory, it certainly will hose any recovery attempts from in that machine.
 
As soon as I started having major problems, I yanked the drives and connected them to my personal (much faster) machine. I seem to have found a way to get at least some of the data uncorrupted, but I don't know if I'll be able to get the files I need yet.

edit: No luck, the only files I managed to retrieve uncorrupted are useless anyways. The error I mentioned in an earlier post was an access violation. I guess it's time to try a new utility.
 
can you post the access violation?
youve switched cables I assume, considering it in a new computer
and have it on a normal IDE channel

File Scavenger is alot better than PCInspector, but its $40
and if there is some sort of electronics damage to the circuit board causing this
then its not going to be any help
have you run the manufacturers diagnostic?

Id find it hard to beleive that even with a circuit board going south it would corrupt the written data on the platters (or at least the data written before the degredation of the circuit board) however trying to read that data now through the currently fubard circuit board and getting garbage makes more sense

since the recovery aps are doing direct scans of the platters

cicuit boards can be swapped, but it can be a real pain to accomplish
http://www.deadharddrive.com/

run the diagnostic and see if there is an error code and post the violation
 
Aparently pcinspector doesn't do a very good job recovering from lost fat32 partitions. I grabbed mbrwork (free dos program) after giving up on pcinspector, and it immediately restored the lost partition, with all the data intact. Talk about a real waste of time. :p
 
well I knew it was junk, but I didnt think it would corrupt everything it tried to recover :p
I'll make a note thanx ;)

Great News :D

I havent used MBRWork as I have an older version of Disk Patch (Repoman)
I'll have to give it a spin, but I dont have anything to fix

currently :p
 
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