Okay, I tried this on a few other forums but most of the responses were from less educated types than I find here on the Empeg board. This isn't a specifically Empeg question but I know we have a lot of hackers here, so I figured it's worth a shot.

Here's the deal. I run Windows 2000 at home on a RAID-0 stripe. That means two 20 GB drives become a faster 40GB drive through the magic of RAID, but there isn't any inherent redundancy as RAID might suggest. So anyway, my system (Duron 800 on an ABit KT7-RAID motherboard) has run solidly for about a year. Well the other night I rebooted and as my PC was going through BIOS messages I saw the dreaded "RAID Stripe Broken" message from my RAID controller.

Uh oh.

So, the long and the short of it. I rebuilt the RAID stripe information, which, to my knowledge, doesn't clear any actual data off the drive, but also doesn't bring everything back to normal. The logical partitions themselves are inaccessible. I tried to recover using various methods found on a few other forums involving some DOS utilities to "detect" the partition layout. Nothing worked so far.

So now I have a lot of important data on the hard drives, but no way to get said data back. Why didn't I back up? Well, I did. But I did it to a CD-RW disc, and I had to erase that disc to do some test burns when I was on with my CDR tech support people. I did this only a week ago, and was going to backup everything again this weekend. The ONE WEEK I don't have a backup, my PC fails. There's irony in there somewhere.

Well anyway, I'm hoping there is a utility out there somewhere that will allow me to comb through my disks and somehow get some of my files back. The partitions were NTFS, and I have not been able to recreate the partitions as they were. Does something like Partition Magic aid in this? Norton Disk Doctor won't detect the partitions or do anything with them...

I have a feeling I'm SOL here, but I'm willing to resort to strange and unusual methods to get some of this data back.

TIA for any and all help.
-Tony

-Tony
MkII #554

OUCH! This is not good. You might try Q245725, but I don't have much hope...

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

Heh, you've just discovered the same thing I did.

If you do RAID without the redundancy feature, you are simply increasing your chances that you'll lose all the data to a disk failure. I had it happen to a file server that was configured with three SCSI drives as one big stripe set. Instead of making a more reliable system, I simply tripled my chances for a catastrophic failure.

Lesson learned: If you're going to do RAID, make sure to get that "R" into the equation somewhere.

Fortunately, I had backups. Needless to say, the backups got restored onto a regular single disk drive and the stripe-set idea was tossed out.

The funny thing is, the whole reason I did the stripe set in the first place, speed, turned out to be a non-factor. The stripe set wasn't any faster than a single drive would have been.

___________
Tony Fabris

Well that looks like exactly what my next step is.. I assume dskprobe.exe is included somewhere on the Win2K installation CD?

I'll give that a shot when I get home. Thanks.
-Tony

-Tony
MkII #554

As far as speed on RAID, it really depends on the hardware. I once did a speed test here at work on an Ultra 2 fibre storage array with Ultra 3 10k drives attached. I was getting around 45 MB per second with Raid 0, 40 with Raid 1, and 37 with Raid 5.

We never recommend Raid 0 though for anything important. Scratch space or temporary things, and it works wonderfully.

Well, it wasn't much of a discovery, I knew that losing the RAID stripe was instant death, though I figured recovering would be easier. My RAID-0 stripe is definitely faster than the disks would be independent of each other. Since I do a lot of Vidcap and video editing stuff, disk speed was really important to me, which is why I went with RAID-0. I thought about RAID 0+1 (striping and mirroring) but that would have required 4 HD's. I also didn't think the Highpoint RAID BIOS would be so buggy as to completely trash my RAID stripe. Boy was I wrong.

I am hopeful about pgrzelak's suggestion, but I am also prepared to deal with the fact that I've probably lost all the data. It's just frustrating that all the data itself is on the disks somewhere, yet there seems to be no way to get it off there.

At least my Empeg's HD's are still in good shape (knocking on wood.)

-Tony
MkII #554

Greetings!

I did not see it on the W2K Server CD. You may want to download it and bring it on disk or another CD. I am looking for the utilities now. They might be downloadable from MS.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

I believe diskprobe is only included with the NT resource kit. I think I can get my hands on a MSDN copy of that or something. Off to do that now...

-Tony
MkII #554

Cool. You are ahead of me. I just traced it to the NT4 Resource Kit, but it is NOT on the W2K Resource Kit.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

I managed to locate a copy of the NT Reskit in the 1999 MSDN binder at work. However the hitch in my plan is that the utility itself runs under Windows and the RAID array was my boot disk. So I have to install on another IDE channel and then hope I can view something on the disks which are attached to the RAID. Not expecting much but it's worth a shot.

Thanks a lot for pointing me to that KB article.

-Tony
MkII #554

Heh, oh yeah, that's the other thing... don't put your OS on a stripe set unless it's redundant.

___________
Tony Fabris

Can you boot from the Win2K CD and use the utility from floppy?

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

Right now I'm in a new Win2K installation on a new hard drive. The RAID stripe is mounted but the logical disks aren't recognized. I can look at sector dumps in DiskProbe, so I have a feeling I might at least be able to get some important ASCII Text files. We'll see about other stuff, not looking so good at the moment...

-Tony
MkII #554