Restoring lost RAID 0 setup

I lost my RAID 0 setup (using Win XP home) and was wondering if there’s a good way to either restore it or at least get back into it to retrieve some data.

I turned on the system last night and it wouldn’t boot; real quick I noticed the RAID status screen that precedes the boot process was missing – not a good sign. So I went into the BIOS and couldn’t find the array name, though I did see both individual SATA drives among the bootable options. I popped in my Win XP CD and it seems to see the array (reports a drive of about 156G, which is my two identical WD 80G drives) but says it’s empty and only gives me an option to partition the whole thing before formatting – also not a good sign.

Normally I’d just wipe the array and reinstall the backup, but I was right in the middle of a big project with a bunch of important data that didn’t get backed up yet (that backup was scheduled for last night!!!). I have an Asus MB with onboard SATA and use Intel RAID drivers, if that makes a difference.

Crossing my fingers …

 

raid0=Availability: Lowest of any RAID level. Lack of fault tolerance means no rapid recovery from failures. Failure of any drive results in array being lost and immediate downtime until array can be rebuilt and data restored from backup

Hmm, dont know why you would have a raid0. Next time do a raid1 so you can have redundecy.

 

Speed, brother, the speed!!!

 

Well, as you can see you are not going to fast now!! next time mirror your Drives! Or do backups every night!

And how much faster can it possibly be? Not much sense you are writing across two drives. And I really dont see an advantage to writing to 2 drives just to have the array fail with no redundency.

 

RAID0 is for the impatient delinquents among ourselves

 

Oops okay so its faster!! But I still cant seem to find the upside to it!

 

The sense is that drives are reletively cheap these days so why not buy 2 and make them fast? For example, I used install XP in <8mins.

 

OK, dad, you can get off the podium now. I get it. Weekly backups aren't enough.

BTW Speed boost was once clocked at about 20%, considerable when using mega-gig video files. Saved countless hours over the years.

Now let's see if I can get some love here, not a lecture.

 

Who's lecturing?

Raid0 is ace but the failure consequences are high - the same as any standard drive. I've not had a fail yet and don't really expect to have one.

Have some love!

 

I am too young to be called dad!! I am not trying to lecture!! Sorry If I came off that way!! But I mean, data you dont have two or more copies of, is data you dont care about!

But, I also know how it is to get caught up and lose sight of the possiblity of catastrophic failure(I have lost data I really should not have too). Though, I am fully prepared these days!

 

I back-up every hour!







...of the first day of the year

 

UPDATE: Happy ending!!

For some reason, the SATA BIOS settings were hosed; everything was switched off. I re-enabled the SATA boot option, re-enabled the SATA RAID option and my RAID 0 is cranking in the fast lane again.

It kind of bothers me why everything switched off like that for no apparent reason but I know weird stuff just happens sometimes. I'm just happy I dodged the bullet on this one.

 

It was only the RAID settings that were affected; all other BIOS settings were intact. Wouldn't a battery problem reset everything?

 

All the posts above essential complaining about how you shouldn't use RAID0 and should backup but with no real useful advice.

If your RAID does fail and the data is so important that you can't live without it. The first thing is to take images of the drives and keep them in a safe place. Therefore any strange configurations that you do to try and get the RAID back won't make things worst.

If the testing of different configuration doesn't work. You can try getting the data back with Data recovery Software and mouting the images. The link below goes through some general data recovery tips and hints:

http://www.datarecoveryadvice.org/