Raid 0 Help

irishproduce

Hi all,

I have a small problem (I hope its small)
About 3 weeks ago, my computer (running XP SP3) wouldn't boot into XP. It would try to load where you would see the blue bar running across the screen but would then stall and wouldn't go any further. My computer is a Dell 9150 and I found a diagnositc disc in the old box. I ran that and after about 7 hours of tests, it found 3 read fails on a hard drive. All other hard drive tests passed but there were these 3 problems. I restarted the computer and it did the same thing, it started bootingh into XP but froze. Myself and friend opened it up (I never had any reason to open it before this) and discovered it was setup as Raid 0 striped. I never knew what Raid was until this discovery. We plugged one of the hard drives into his tower to see if we could see into the disc but although it could see it and assigned it a letter (e) it insisted we format the drive. Obviously, having never performed a back up over the last few years I wouldn't do this so I just took it home again. When I plugged them back in their sata slots, I got the message on the blackb bios screen re the two drives: One saying Member Disc and the other saying Non raid disc. My computer lost the array. Now I created my second problem. My question is, can I fix this mess? I never worked on raid before so I am edgy about it but cautious. I should have run recovery console or something on the original problem but I rushed into trying to fix it.
Is it possible that I can save the stuff on the drives or best case scenario, restore my computer?
If I have left out any crucial details, please let me know and I will answer anything I can. I very much appreciate any advice I can get as I am obviously worried I am going to lose everything I should have been backing up

irish

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Hi all,

I have a small problem (I hope its small)
About 3 weeks ago, my computer (running XP SP3) wouldn't boot into XP. It would try to load where you would see the blue bar running across the screen but would then stall and wouldn't go any further. My computer is a Dell 9150 and I found a diagnositc disc in the old box. I ran that and after about 7 hours of tests, it found 3 read fails on a hard drive. All other hard drive tests passed but there were these 3 problems. I restarted the computer and it did the same thing, it started bootingh into XP but froze. Myself and friend opened it up (I never had any reason to open it before this) and discovered it was setup as Raid 0 striped. I never knew what Raid was until this discovery. We plugged one of the hard drives into his tower to see if we could see into the disc but although it could see it and assigned it a letter (e) it insisted we format the drive. Obviously, having never performed a back up over the last few years I wouldn't do this so I just took it home again. When I plugged them back in their sata slots, I got the message on the blackb bios screen re the two drives: One saying Member Disc and the other saying Non raid disc. My computer lost the array. Now I created my second problem. My question is, can I fix this mess? I never worked on raid before so I am edgy about it but cautious. I should have run recovery console or something on the original problem but I rushed into trying to fix it.
Is it possible that I can save the stuff on the drives or best case scenario, restore my computer?
If I have left out any crucial details, please let me know and I will answer anything I can. I very much appreciate any advice I can get as I am obviously worried I am going to lose everything I should have been backing up

irish

Striping has no fault redundancy at that level. Formatting made it much worse. There's no realistic hope unless you want to go to a recovery service.

irishproduce

Thanks Spear,

I didn't format it though, I chose not to as I knew if there was any hope of getting stuff off it I would have to leave the original structure in place.

Basically the discs are as they were originally but for whatever reason, because we plugged them out and plugged them into my friends computer to see if we could see in, my computer can't see the array anymore and now says the array is not bootable.

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Thanks Spear,

I didn't format it though, I chose not to as I knew if there was any hope of getting stuff off it I would have to leave the original structure in place.

Basically the discs are as they were originally but for whatever reason, because we plugged them out and plugged them into my friends computer to see if we could see in, my computer can't see the array anymore and now says the array is not bootable.

Ah, okay, I misread that you formatted it. In that case you'll need to reassign it back to the array in the controller BIOS as a member again. Don't attempt to alter the filesystem. It probably won't boot, but you could boot that machine from another disc (DVD or harddisk) and potentially recover files.

irishproduce

Phew...thanks man.
I think I went in around that option. It asks me when it is at that failed screen to press Ctrl & I to enter configuration. In there is what can only be the Raid instructions but there are only 4 option as follows:
Create Raid
Delete Raid
Make disc non raid disc
Exit

If I select the first one, it tells me there isn't enough space. The other 2 warn that I will lose everything so I stay away. Is there another way to tell it to make the disc raid again?

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Phew...thanks man.
I think I went in around that option. It asks me when it is at that failed screen to press Ctrl & I to enter configuration. In there is what can only be the Raid instructions but there are only 4 option as follows:
Create Raid
Delete Raid
Make disc non raid disc
Exit

If I select the first one, it tells me there isn't enough space. The other 2 warn that I will lose everything so I stay away. Is there another way to tell it to make the disc raid again?

You should be able to remove both from the RAID set and recreate the RAID set. You'll need to keep the disk in the same order as they were originally.

irishproduce

I'll give it a whirl so, thanks. I can ignore the message that I will lose data so, ya? The only problem is, I have no way of knowing which drive was in the first slot and which was in the second slot. Do you think it would matter?

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

I'll give it a whirl so, thanks. I can ignore the message that I will lose data so, ya? The only problem is, I have no way of knowing which drive was in the first slot and which was in the second slot. Do you think it would matter?

Yes, the order matters. There should be a disk or volume ID shown. If it's wrong, it should just be a matter of switching them anyway.

irishproduce

Good man, thanks for the help. Appreciate it

Irish

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Good man, thanks for the help. Appreciate it

Irish

Naturally I disclaim any liability for data loss, hardware loss, fire, explosions etc that may follow.

irishproduce

No bother :-D

irishproduce

Ok, I am going to try to restore the raid array in the next hour. Just so I am sure before proceeding, if Spear is still there or anyone who can follow what we were talking about, am I correct in thinking the following:

Ensure Volume (0) is attached in slot 0 and the other volume is attached in slot 2

I can go Ctrl + I and delete the raid array that is there. save and exit. It will restart, I go Ctrl + I again, create an array. Let it do that. Save and exit and the old array should be there again?

Is that what I am aiming for?

Thanks

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Ok, I am going to try to restore the raid array in the next hour. Just so I am sure before proceeding, if Spear is still there or anyone who can follow what we were talking about, am I correct in thinking the following:

Ensure Volume (0) is attached in slot 0 and the other volume is attached in slot 2

I can go Ctrl + I and delete the raid array that is there. save and exit. It will restart, I go Ctrl + I again, create an array. Let it do that. Save and exit and the old array should be there again?

Is that what I am aiming for?

Thanks

Yes, the old array should be in place.

irishproduce

Ok, I fully understand now. I am giving it a lash here but I do get a message when I select "Delete Raid Volume" as follows: Deleting a volume will destroy the volume data on the drives and cause any member discs to become available as non raid discs" Then below that in big writing it says "Warning: Existing data within this volume will be lost and non recoverable"


Then it asks will I continue.

So, the drives are in corect slots now as it looks like this:

ID Name Level Strip Size Status Bootable

0 ARRAY RAIDO(stripe) 128KB 298.0GB Failed No

Physical Drives:
Port Drive Model Serial# Size Type/Status
0 WDC WD1600JS-75N WD-WCANM6564019 149.0GB Member Disc (0)
2 ST3160812AS 9LS0TN1D 149.0GB Non Raid Disc


At this point I am going to restart it, select the config utility and select delete raid volume and not make discs non raid. I will ignore the warning. Construct it again after that using the same information as above. Save and restart again and hopefully it should acknowledge them together and go back to making its failed attempt to boot into XP (another problem I will work on later)

This is it...you are sure I should proceed, if I follow exactly as I should, I won't lose the data? I am not looking for it in gold just that you are confident I shouldn't.

Thanks again for the support

Spear

irishproduce wrote: »

Ok, I fully understand now. I am giving it a lash here but I do get a message when I select "Delete Raid Volume" as follows: Deleting a volume will destroy the volume data on the drives and cause any member discs to become available as non raid discs" Then below that in big writing it says "Warning: Existing data within this volume will be lost and non recoverable"


Then it asks will I continue.

So, the drives are in corect slots now as it looks like this:

ID Name Level Strip Size Status Bootable

0 ARRAY RAIDO(stripe) 128KB 298.0GB Failed No

Physical Drives:
Port Drive Model Serial# Size Type/Status
0 WDC WD1600JS-75N WD-WCANM6564019 149.0GB Member Disc (0)
2 ST3160812AS 9LS0TN1D 149.0GB Non Raid Disc


At this point I am going to restart it, select the config utility and select delete raid volume and not make discs non raid. I will ignore the warning. Construct it again after that using the same information as above. Save and restart again and hopefully it should acknowledge them together and go back to making its failed attempt to boot into XP (another problem I will work on later)

This is it...you are sure I should proceed, if I follow exactly as I should, I won't lose the data? I am not looking for it in gold just that you are confident I shouldn't.

Thanks again for the support

Each member disk of a RAID array has a block information that contains info about the RAID set it belongs to, the position of the disk within the set etc. This is normally all that should be removed. If you're still hesitant there is an alternative method of using recovery tool such as Disk Internals Raid Recovery which uses software to map non-RAID drives together to act as a RAID drive again allowing files to be pulled from it. You'll need another disc with a working Windows install on it first, and with enough space for recovered files. I used to have the name of another suitable tool somewhere, but I can't find it now. I'll have to wait until I'm home to check it later. Raid Recovery has a free trial that can be tested at least.

http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/

irishproduce

Morning, thanks Spear.
I stopped short of going ahead with all of it last night...just more nervous I suppose.
What I did was, I unplugged the two sata drives, stuck in a small IDE hard drive with XP on it. Opened a program call Raid Reconstructor which seems to be able to see the raid drives alright. It wants to mount an image of it now so I have to borrow a big hard drive from a friend tonight to see if I can make that image of the array...after that I will try to get information that is important off it and then I will go ahead with the steps above and hopefully reconstruct the array.

I will post back with what happened later tonight

irishproduce

The temporary drive with an operating system on it failed last night. Couldn't proceed unfortunately. Will having another go on Friday night so will report back

irishproduce

Ok, salvaged most of the stuff from the array using raid re constructor and moved it to external drive. Followed the instructions as above and repaired the array, now showing in the very first screen as "Status" Normal. "Bootable" Yes.

Nothing happens though. It can see the two drives, has them listed as member discs but nothing happens.

If I boot in using the IDE drive with the OP it cannot see the array/ discs in my computer.

So the array is recreated exactly as it was before but nothing happens.

Any ideas?

It might be worth noting there is a jumper on the board next to the 4 sata slots, I lifted this and positioned it differently (Don't know why) and the computer wouldn't turn on, set it another way and it turned on but reset the bios clock and things.Not sure if that matters.
Any advice appreciated

irish