Dead mirrored drives

[yaruar]

Way back, maybe a year ago i have a server running with 2x250gb sata150 drives running linux (opensuse from what i remember) running on a snazzy 8 port sata controller in a mirrored configuration. I ended up selling the mobo, controller and memory because, to be quite frank, they were worth a relative fortune on ebay, mp athlon 2500's and a 2gb stick of ram and enterprise level sata controller FTW! I was going to buy a cheaper more modern setup with the cash, but bills came in the way.

Flash forward to last week and i finally got an old p4 mobo from work and built it up, no onboard sata, but i did have a 2 port pci sata controller, so plugged that in, had a primary ide running XP pro and went to see what i could see. Did no config on the drives as the data was important, i had photos and music archived off onto there from when i was running out of space and trusted it being on 2 drives.

Only problem is i can't see anything on teh drives, i fully expected windows not to see them , but i fired up vmware with an opensuse boot disc iso and nada, i've also fired up Acronis disk utils and have tried a fast partition recovery (found nothing, took a day) and full partition recovery on 1 drive, so far been running for 3 days, about 15/20% through and had only seen the swap partition so far, it's probably going to take another 15 days at least to run if not more at this rate doing a front to back end individual sector check. It's bloody annoying.

I've taken the mirrored pair out to take to work tomorrow as my maching has onboard sata to check what i can see there, so any suggestions from anyone as i'm going to be well pissed off if i leave a maching running a recovery for the best part of a month (the slowness alone makes me wonder if it's a controller problem...) and find nothing!!

 

[Kryten]

This is much of the trouble.
I may be wrong, however I believe the "better" RAID cards, such as enterprise level kit stores the relevant configuration information on the controller itself rather than on the drives, as opposed to the more basic controllers/onboard raid things.
Unfortunately I can't be much help on the recovery side of it other than suggesting what your'e already doing :/

 

[rynnor]

You were setup with RAID 1 I take it? If you were doing parity checking or any of the nested RAID combos your probably doomed (I hate Raid )

I'm surprised you cant see anything on those drives if it was just simple mirroring rather than any of the fiddly combos.

It could just be the old motherboard your using to look at them - hopefully your work pc will let you access the data.

Good luck!

 

[yaruar]

You were setup with RAID 1 I take it? If you were doing parity checking or any of the nested RAID combos your probably doomed (I hate Raid )

I'm surprised you cant see anything on those drives if it was just simple mirroring rather than any of the fiddly combos.

It could just be the old motherboard your using to look at them - hopefully your work pc will let you access the data.

Good luck!

Nah, tried it on my work mobo and drives were blank. Got hold of a demo of Easeus data recovery wizard pro (having tried about 4 or 5 different things to no avail) and that found all the drive contents, however the full version is about $80 so i'm debating if the software is worth that much, although it's probably quite a useful product.) I could ask our data forensics team at work if they can see what's on there but i really don't want to waste their time and resources on personal files.... I'm going to try a few cheaper alternatives first i think...

I've never had problems with raid in the past, but this is my first time using consumer level hardware which is the only thing i can see actually being the problem, something in the way the controller set up the partitions means they are unreadable on other hardware. Which is annoying, but it's my own fault for not taking proper backups before selling the kit.

 

[Deebs]

Actually many of the top end controllers will store a copy of the raid configuration on each drive in the array. That way if the controller fails you simply replace it without worrying about data loss. Also this helps in upgrading the controller.

Most raid controllers require the insertion of a driver to enable the system to read the data on the array. Every controller can potentially layout the data on the drive in a different format which a "standard" OS will not read.

 

[yaruar]

Actually many of the top end controllers will store a copy of the raid configuration on each drive in the array. That way if the controller fails you simply replace it without worrying about data loss. Also this helps in upgrading the controller.

Most raid controllers require the insertion of a driver to enable the system to read the data on the array. Every controller can potentially layout the data on the drive in a different format which a "standard" OS will not read.

I think i've found a solution, acronis sucks balls for file recovery, and i'm not paying cash for something else, but diskinternals linux recovery seems to be able to see the files, and it's free, although it's very processor intensive so i'm going to have to run it overnight and see what it finds.