Raid array went down. Can it be saved?

[hobo_crew]

Hey guys/girls,

I am glad to see the forums are up and running again! Just in time.

I ran into a problem on the weekend with my Raid 0 array and I need some help/advice.

So here is how it went down.

I originally had two raid 0 arrays. My OS was on two agility 3 set up as a raid 0 and a storage raid0 with three 2tb HDD (yes I know it’s kind of silly to have storage as raid 0).

Everything was working fine until Friday when one of the SSDs went down and is no longer detected. So I bought a new Intel 520 SSD 240gb on Sunday. Plugged the new drive loaded windows new drive works fine.

The problem came when I tried to switch on the storage raid array. I turned on raid in the bios and now one of the drives is shown as non-raid the other two still show raid0. I didn’t switch any of these drives nor did I unplug or do anything to them. Any ideas as to how I can save my data?

Also the new Intel SSD doesn’t seem to want to boot when I switch the bios from IDE to raid. Any ideas on this. I know my it should probably be set to AHCI but I am trying to use raid so I just left it as IDE.I haven’t had time yet to research the new Intel drive.

Any help or advice would be great.

[hobo_crew]

Seems to me from what I have been reading. My only option is to try and recreate the array.

In theory if I delete the array of the two that still had it. Then create a new one exactly like the old one.
It might just go back to normal.

I think my problem with the not booting once I switched the bios to raid was that it was trying to boot off a non existent array. I just nee to change my boot priority to fix that problem.

[Squeetard]

Your Raid 0 is toast. Your gonna be really mad and I am probably going to laugh when your 6tb raid 0 storage array shits the bed, and it will.

[Arinoth]

Raid 0 is great for when everything is working, however if it goes, then you basically have nothing as the data is stored across the two.

Even if you could rebuild the raid, data will be lost still, and more then you think.

This is why many people prefer to use raid 1 or raid 5 as it has redundancy built into it, whereas Raid 0 has none.

[enaberif]

raid 0 for storage? oh man you are in a world of hurt

[Squeetard]

3 - 2tb disks! A lifetime of movies, porn and games, all gone in the blink of an eye.

[gingerbee]

yup like others have said never use raid0 for storage at all just an incident waiting to happen

[Bungwirez]

not the porn!!!

[NyteOwl]

I advise clients never sue RAID 0 for anything. The marginal speed increase is not worth the increased risk of data loss, even on a system only drive. RAID 0 is actually an oxymoron as there is no redundancy whatsoever.

That said; IF the drives in the data array are ok, and this is an Intel matrix type conrtoller, changing the drive type in BIOS tor RAID, reinstalling your OS on the system drive(s), checking the proper boot order, you MIGHT be lucky enough to have the array come back up intact. If it does, I'd advise making immediate backups and moving to a RAID 1,5,6,or 10 array for your data.

[BlueByte]

There is RAID recovery software out there, I cant think of any free ones off the top of my head. But you can get data back from a RAID(if a decent controller, it might have some bundled software), or if you have priceless stuff on there you can send to a lab and they will recover probably a good chunk, and then drain your bank account a good chunk. if its just videos, music etc count it lost, move on.

If you want to use 3 disks run RAID 5, or use 2 in RAID 1 and use the 3rd as a actual backup drive since as you now know RAID is not a backup.