Sata drive preventing boot - trying to recover RAID-0 data

[stringer]

Just recently my system is unable to load any OS regardless of
whether I try an boot from a USB drive or another HD as long as the drives below are plugged in it seems to hang.

Here is the setup I had:
DFI Lan Party Ultra-D NF4 and were in an Nvidia RAID-0 configuration:
SATA01 - WDC WD5000AAKS-22TMA
SATA02 - WDC WD5000AAKS-22TMA

While the systems is booting the RAID shows a status of healthy.
The system scans for the drives looking for an OS and hangs.
I hit reset on the case after some time and the system goes through the same checks except it has trouble detecting the raid.
When i power off the machine and it goes through its checks the status shows Healthy again.

Did some troubleshooting and research on some of the other threads and tried disabling the RAID array in the BIOS and attempting to use ubuntu to read from the drive. In the BIOS I see the 2 drives above however in ubuntu i only see one 500GB drive.

I also tried connecting the 2 drives to my new GA-X58A-UD5 motherboard with raid disabled and it recognizes the 2 drives but also will not boot (even though the SSD is the first one on the boot priority list not the 2 WDs).
The message I get is:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I’m curious to know if there is any way to recover the data from the drives.

The kicker to all this is that I was trying to backup the data using a 2TB WD Green (sata) in XP but when I transferred the drive to my win 7 machine it could not recognize the disk. So I formatted the 2TB drive (using a slow format that took hours) and attempted to back up my data again when this all happened.

 

[NetworkStorageTips]

RAID0 is garbage unless the RAID controller is enabled with proper driver loaded so the OS can see it properly, so with RAID disabled you simply have junk - not readable data.

If Ubuntu only saw one drive it must not be loading an appropriate RAID controller driver.

RAID0 is not recommended for data (I never recommend it at all).

Wish I had something better to tell you.

Roger.

 

[stringer]

The purpose of disabling the fakeRAID was to have ubuntu or any other linux use it's software raid to read data off the disks. The problem was that i could only see one drive so i couldn't restore. On the disk that was restored i could see some raid metadata.

Not sure why it's preventing me from booting though. If i could get into windows i could possibly try some recovery software but the fact that it will not boot an OS prevents me from doing anything. This is my main obstacle.

EDIT: disk was not restore.. above should read disk that was visible.

 

[TierraDave]

Try cloning the suspect drive to another hard drive using a LiveCD with the suspect drive connected to the USB port.
If that is successful then you will need to figure out drive order and stripe size (plus RAID0 volume offset if there is one) in order to re-build the RAID0 volume and recover your data.

 

[stringer]

Try cloning the suspect drive to another hard drive using a LiveCD with the suspect drive connected to the USB port.
If that is successful then you will need to figure out drive order and stripe size (plus RAID0 volume offset if there is one) in order to re-build the RAID0 volume and recover your data.

Really appreciate the help on this. Any recommendations on LiveCDs to use? or good cloning programs / procedures?

 

[TierraDave]

Really appreciate the help on this. Any recommendations on LiveCDs to use? or good cloning programs / procedures?

I don't think you can do much better than the Linux RIP CD (use ddrescue to clone)- it's very powerful (but practice on some spare drives if you can first- if you get the ddrescue command the wrong way round you can wipe the data from your drive).

 

[stringer]

I'll check out ddrescue. Tried search for linux rip cd but no luck. Is this a particular distro you are referring to? (not a linux guy at all).

 

[TierraDave]

RIP is a stand alone bootable CD with ddrescue included- a little study of the help pages will be needed but you certainly don't need to be a Linux expert.

If you google for RIP it should be easy enough to find- read the help page included regarding the use of ddrescue it is very useful but do have a dry run first just to be safe.

To be honest the tricky bit is going to be re-building the RAID volume unless you are experienced with this kind of work.

Good luck with it though.

 

[stringer]

Looks like things are a little more challenging. I believe i have identified the drive that is causing issues however the problem is that it's not being recognized by the BIOS. I let my system boot into Win7 then plugged in the external drive (with HD in question) and it was recognized as windows installed the necessary drivers but i wouldn't see the drive come up at all. Under device manager it appears however if you go to Computer > Manage > Disk Management, there is nothing there.

I tried this in linux as well (ubuntu) and did an lsusb. Nothing came up when the drive was plugged in.

Any ideas how i can get my system / bios to recognize the drive? (btw the drive access mode was IDE but i changed it to AHCI.

 

[dEAne]

Try this one>
http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

 

[Guest]

There are some tools that can restore files from raid.

Resources:
http://www.icare-recovery.com/howto/recover-files-raid.html

Test by your own.

 

[stringer]

Thanks for the software suggestions. The problem i am having is that 1 of the two drives is not appearing in under my computer > manage > disk management (windows 7 64bit) but i can see the disk in the device list when i check under system devices. I have the problem drive in an external usb 3.0 enclosure and it is recognized as a device but does not show up as a disk. Any thoughts on how i can get the device to show up as a disk????

Once i get this part working, i can run the suggested software.

 

[stringer]

Quick update on my progress....(if you can call it that)

I plugged the external drive containing the suspected faulty WDC WD5000AAKS-22TMA drive to my vista laptop and it showed an entry under disk manager.

The drive appeared as follows:
Disk 1

Not initialized

My concern is that if i initialize the drive, i might loose any information that may be still on it.

If anyone can offer suggestions....I'm more than open to them.

Hope someone out there can help...

 

[sub mesa]

Do not initialize your drive! Doing so will perform a quick format on that drive, destroying part of your data and writing a new partition table; this is not what you want.

Instead, try the RAID recovery utilities available to you. You may also check the surface of your disks first, and SMART data. You can even try Spinrite, though that is a commercial product, it can correct bad sectors on your drives if that's the curlpit. SMART information should list the Current Pending Sector and UDMA CRC Error Count; both would need to be zero or you either have an ACTIVE bad sector (very dangerous) or cabling errors. Do this on each HDD part of the RAID.

Hope this helps, cheers.

 

[stringer]

Do not initialize your drive! Doing so will perform a quick format on that drive, destroying part of your data and writing a new partition table; this is not what you want.

Instead, try the RAID recovery utilities available to you. You may also check the surface of your disks first, and SMART data. You can even try Spinrite, though that is a commercial product, it can correct bad sectors on your drives if that's the curlpit. SMART information should list the Current Pending Sector and UDMA CRC Error Count; both would need to be zero or you either have an ACTIVE bad sector (very dangerous) or cabling errors. Do this on each HDD part of the RAID.

Hope this helps, cheers.

Really appreciate the help.

I have avoided anything that would involve writing to the HD as much as possible since I have been having problems.


With respect to the raid recovery utils. I can't get the OS to display the disk as a drive (it's only showing up in device manager when I connect via a usb enclosure). If i plug the drive into my case then i can't boot an os. This is basically the obstacle that is preventing me from trying any software. Unless there is something to overcome this.

Spinrite was something i was investigating last night. It does a whole bunch of reads/writes to the drive so i was concerned that if it didn't recognize the drive as part of a raid array, it would essential destroy the data. (i could be way off on this). Should i be concerned?

I can give spinrite a try tonight but I don't think i'll be able to boot into spinrite's freedos via usb if the drive is plugged in to the mobo. If it's connect via the enclose my fear is that it won't be recognized, similar to the other apps i have tried.

I'm at wits end here....but willing to try anything non-destructive.

 

[stringer]

I took the drive that was not recognized by the OS to a data recovery business. They informed me that the drive has a "bad firmware encryption" and that they could possibly recover the data.

Before I proceed, I'm wondering if anyone knows a way to pull data in this type of scenario.

 

[jrvppr]

I have 10 WD 0ne TB hard drives that were in a raid array. I was able to see and get the data off with Mini XP on Hirens disk. I am not able to Initialize disk in Windows 7. I am not able to load Windows Yet I can install Ubuntu 12.1 and utilize the whole drive. I also call a data recovery place and they assure me they can remove the raid array coding and make the drives usable in windows again. I am hoping this info about using Mini xp on the Hirens bootle disk will help stringer if its not too late. and hoping anyone knows how to make the disks usable in windows again if you dont care about the data.