Recover Raid 0

zolo30 · June 20, 2016

Alright I have done lots of reading and researching and I am not looking for opinions. That said my problem is I accidentally reset my motherboard to default settings and my RAID 0 failed to boot. I switched RAID back on in the BIOS and it was showing only one drive in the RAID. So I deleted the RAID and created a new one with the same exact name and size. The problem I am having is I am unable to access my data on the drives. While using trial verisions of recovery software I can see and preview my files and nothing is corrupted or loss but the software wants to charge me 70+ USD to get my data. I am unwilling to pay the price and there are a few pieces of data I would like to not lose forever. Does anyone have a solution on how I can access my data without paying? Remember my drives did not die/fail, nothing is corrupted, my data is all still there and verified by other software, I am just unable to access the data.

bjd223 · June 21, 2016

The RAID 0 is your OS drive correct? In that case the longer you use the drive, the more data you will overwrite, because your controller thinks the sectors are open for writing.

I would discontinue use of the drives ASAP.

As far as recovering the RAID volume, different vendors have different approaches, however AFAIK Intel ICH doesn't offer anyway to run a recovery command.

I would say that whatever you can recover via software is your best bet, however some of those files may be corrupt because random stripes are being overwritten by using the drive. Recovery software searches for certain file headers but doesn't guarantee the whole file is still present until you try to open it after recovering it.

Do you know if an INIT occurred when you re-created the volume? I once saw someone accidently re-create a volume w/ INIT on a 100TB volume and accidently delete a lot of files before he noticed the process was taking too long.

zolo30 · June 21, 2016

The RAID is my data drive my OS is on a separate drive. Also I have come to the conclusion that in order to retrieve my files I am going to have to pay a service to one of these software programs. I have yet to find a free way around this. I will only be missing some video and a few documents that I would like to have not loss but at this point I can not justify paying for the service. I may just do a full wipe and start over.

bjd223 · June 21, 2016

Unfortunately most software RAID doesn't have the same features as discrete cards, which would have probably let you recover the volume at the RAID level. When a drive drops from RAID0 the volume goes directly to failed, so bringing that drive back online without any changes to anything is the first priority.

If the stuff on that drive is really important I would personally switch to RAID1, and add an external backup on top of that.

zolo30 · June 21, 2016

NOthing on the drive is really that important. Yeah there are a few videos I created I would like to keep around and some raw footage I have not touched yet but to be honest most of it is crap. I have the RAID reconstructed correctly and nothing is corrupt i just spent the last hour looking over the files in a preview mode to see if I really care to lose any of it. I am leaning on the side of letting it all go. The only reason I did RAID 0 was for one large storage device because it bugs me to see multiple drives.....however I could get over that. Out of the 5.4TB the RAID gave me I still have 3.4TB free space with 90% of that space being video games that I can redownload anytime from the internet whenever I want especially with my 300 download speed.....which means I could easily do a RAID 1 and have everytthing be very secure while adding a network storage device as well for extra protection. Basically agreeing with you but I am just wanting to talk this all out before I go for it.

bjd223 · July 1, 2016

On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2016 at 0:43 PM, zolo30 said:

NOthing on the drive is really that important. Yeah there are a few videos I created I would like to keep around and some raw footage I have not touched yet but to be honest most of it is crap. I have the RAID reconstructed correctly and nothing is corrupt i just spent the last hour looking over the files in a preview mode to see if I really care to lose any of it. I am leaning on the side of letting it all go. The only reason I did RAID 0 was for one large storage device because it bugs me to see multiple drives.....however I could get over that. Out of the 5.4TB the RAID gave me I still have 3.4TB free space with 90% of that space being video games that I can redownload anytime from the internet whenever I want especially with my 300 download speed.....which means I could easily do a RAID 1 and have everytthing be very secure while adding a network storage device as well for extra protection. Basically agreeing with you but I am just wanting to talk this all out before I go for it.

If you don't like the drives showing up as separate drive letters, and don't need to run RAID0, you should use JBOD. It will show all the drives as one volume, and if one drive fails only the stuff on that drive is lost. There is no data obfuscation either, so drives can be placed directly in other PC/enclosures and data can be copied off.

It will not get as good performance as RAID though.