[Generale Falco]

Hi everyone,
been mainly reading around for a long time. Always great.

Today howver, I'm at a loss and turn to you guys for the best advise possibile. I know the Web is full of suggestions, but the way I know this Site I believe I cannot receive as good advise anywhere else.

This morning woke up and all my THREE DRIVES were NOT bootable. These are:


1) Samsung SpinPoint F3 1000GB, SATA II (HD103SJ)- windows 7 32-bit and a standalone drive

2) RAID-0 Array composed of 2x Western Digital RE3 1000GB, SATA II (WD1002FBYS) - windows 2008 R2 64-bit


The Samsung drive had been installed AFTER the raid-0 config was in place. Now this drive was also not accessible anymore.....
So I formatted the samsung and reinstalled windows on it (where I'm now writing from). Works fine.

However, in the device manager and thus in windows I only see ONE of the two WDs drives and this appears as NOT FORMATTED. The other one is not even seen. However upon booting the PC it is recognized by the BIOS and thus in DOS.

In the past I successfully recovered data from single drives by using easy recovery pro. When I start this program, I see both WD drives yet with no filesytem allocated and thus unreadable!! I can specify the file system manually there and continue by scanning the drive/s. Would take about 7 hours for each.

The QUESTION is: would there be a chance then? By using this method? Or do you guys have some other (very welcome suggestions)?

I have NOT done anything with the WD drives yet (neither format, nor recreated/deleted array).

Sorry for being lenghty, but hope I've explained as best as I could. Thanks in advance for your responses.


Regards,
Cris

[HMTK]

Just restore your most recent backup on a new array.

[Generale Falco]

Thanks.
Unfortunately I have/had some data on it, which had not been backed up. I have no problems in starting all over again, but there are some files there (photos, songs etc....) that I would like to get back. I wanted to transfer everything before, but stupidly enough I kept postponing that!!

[Florz]

In a RAID-0 array the data is written across the two drives (striped), so scanning the drives individually with the tool you are using will probably not recover anything, I'm afraid. You could however try a RAID recovery tool like this one.

[Mkruer]

I have had good success with R-Studio http://www.r-studio.com/ though I have to admit that I haven't tried to recover from a failed RAID array. Still as long at the drive spin,the heads are not foobared and there is no smoke coming out of the circuitboard, R-Studio has recovered my information successfully. (BTW I can honestly say I have never lost any information, All the recovery I do is for either work or my friends. )

[Generale Falco]

Thanks a lot people for the replies and suggestions!
To my joy, and after a very long day, in the middle of night operations were finalized.

It appears I managed to RECOVER EVERYTHING (today I'll look at the stuff in more details though).

As Florz mentioned, some tools were, are useless with RAID recoveries. Or simply they do not support it. I turned to a program we have at the office - from Getdata (Recover My files Pro).

As mentioned, both drives were seen by each and every software though only one was recognized in the windows environment. So the only solution was to mount the TWO drives, creating a "user raid", which was detected (by the recovery tool) as SUCCESSFULLY as Raid 0! I let the search/scan begin and after a couple of hours I already had what I needed to recover. Needless to say that the scan would have gone on further (block by block) for another couple of days or so. I then selected ALL types of file and saved the data across onto the samsung standalone drive (the one I'm currently booting from).

So that was it. I saw it ugly at first. Also it was my first recovery with a RAID-0 environment and the fear grew bigger as a result.
Fortunately I can say that each time (4 in total) I managed to recover data successfully. The drives (3 desktop drives and 1 2,5" external HD) were never unrecoverable in my case.

However, I'll still take at the solutions suggested in the last couple of replies. THANKS MUCH.


Regards,

Cris

This post has been edited by Generale Falco: 08 February 2010 - 02:48 AM

[Brian]

Cris - I'm glad you got it worked out. That's a troubling experience to sort through. It does of course highlight he need for regular and frequent backups.

[continuum]

You are one lucky bastard. Start keeping real backups!