RAID0 drive failure

[Roady]

Hi all

I have a PC with two WD Raptor 140gig drives setup as RAID 0 (Striping). THis RAIs has the O/S installed on it. One of the drives has become faulty and has been sent off for awarranty replacement.

Have I now lost all data? or can it be recovered when I get my new drive.

I have also made a complete backup of my PC prior to this problem to!

[miltonhork]

Hi

You could try a chkdsk c: /f in cmd prompt and tell it to run the next time windows starts. This will check your disks' filesystem for bad sectors or other errors and fix them. If it finds bad sectors you may want to look at buying two new drives or just one if you don't wanna do raid 0 again.
And, as was already mentioned, back up any important data you have just in case!

[Paul Komski]

You will not be able to run a chkdsk on half of a RAID-0 array as suggested because half an array contains no file system. The only hope of reconstrucing a RAID-0 would be if both drives were still normally accessible - even if the array had been broken for whatever reason.

Nor is any data recovery possible from just one half of a RAID-0 array other than for a very few very small files whose data could possibly be on just one drive before it got striped.

Your backed up data is really, to all intents and purposes, the only old data you still have to play with.

Personally I would avoid RAID-0 in the future since the performance gains are minimal and the data loss and inherent instability maximal.

[Roady]

Ok thanks for that.

Im awaiting my new Raptor drive via WD warranty relpacement scheme. Im going to do away with any RAID in future, and I have tried rebuilding a fresh install of Vista on the drive I have left (Identical drive) but its proving difficult to do. I have disabled RAID in the BIOS so the Pc now sees it as a normal SATA 150gig Hard drive but I cant seem to get any OS on it, it Blue screens just pass the license part of the fresh install. I have blanked the disk with Kill disk but im still struggeling.
I had previously overclocked the Q6600 before any problems to make the CPU run at 3.00mhz rather than the standard 2.4, does this cause issues installing OS on a overclocked system? Im wondering wether to set my BIOS back to defaults!

Any help, much appreciated.

[Paul Komski]

You can try defaults of course. SATA drives can, somewhat confusingly, be configured in three main ways and, also confusingly, the nomenclature used varies from BIOS to BIOS.

The three basics are RAID, AHCI and IDE-emulation. AHCI is fully supported out of the box for Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Linux operating systems from kernel 2.6.19 so that would seem to be an unlikely reason for any problems as long as the BIOS is not enabled for RAID.

BSODs like that could be driver related I suppose and I would certainly see if the BSOD is avoided in Safe Mode. I would also check all your hardware for Vista compatibility even though you were apparently dual booting to include Vista on what is almost identical hardware.

[Roady]

I'll try the defaults in BIOS and see what happens. No hardware has changed except one less Raptor WD hard drive.

It was 64bit Vista I was using with no issues before, I also had to take out 2gig of RAM out as you can only install VISTA64bit with 2gig because of the limitations. I will try installing XP to first see if this goes on.

Im unable try safe mode as there is no O/S on the drive anymore as I kill disked it.

[Roady]

Happy days, it seems you cant install OS with an overclocked configuration in the BIOS. I have now installled Vista64 bit back on with no RAID!

Does anyone know if it is possible to restore from an image that was taken from my previous RAID0 setup to a none RAID, 1 hard disk setup uisng the same PC. This way id have my PC with all the software back as it was but with no RAID.

Many thanks for your help guys. Hope we all learned something here.