RAID 0 hard drive failure

Varinn · August 2012

Been having issues with my computer not booting recently and finally got around to looking into it. I've gotten into windows and found that the culprit was one of my two data storage drives in a RAID 0 setup is listed as "missing" and not detected through windows 7. The drive lists perfectly in the BIOS however. What sort of options do I have to attempt to recover the things I had left on the drives? I have backups of some things but I was still rebuilding from a recent reformat of my OS drive and haven't copied everything so I'd like to try and retrieve my resume, pictures, etc from them. The rest of the things like games movies can be scrapped easily.

Is there any procedure for attempting to reactivate the drive in windows after a failure, maybe some software I can use?

Foomy · August 2012

if one of the drives in a raid 0 die, than everything on that raid volume is gone.

the most you try is to see if the raid is recoverable in the raid controller, usually an option either in your bios, or you press a key after the bios boot to access it, But with raid 0 I wouldn't get your hopes up too much.

Raid 0 is usually a terrible idea, it doubles the chances of losing data, and the benefits of slightly faster read/write times and not having 2 separate volumes usually just isn't worth it.

Athenor · August 2012

I cannot express how many times the words "Do not use RAID 0" have been uttered in relation to my job in the last 2 years. It's a HORRIBLE idea unless you need something blazing fast and you don't care about the contents of it.

If you must have striping, go Raid 5 or Raid 10.

As for recovery: A professional company can probably pull out the bits that it can, but they're likely to be incomplete. It is still doable for a very high amount.

You said the drive is viewable in the BIOS. Is that the physical drives or the logical drive? have you tried running a SMART test against the drives to see what those say?

ArbitraryDescriptor · August 2012

I've recovered data off of RAID 0 with Testdisk. YMMV, but what do you have to lose?

Varinn · August 2012

I have not done anything beyond attempting to perform the recovery through the windows disk manager. I will try checking what you've suggested when I get home tonight and see what I can figure out. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll find something but at the moment I'm not holding my breath, nothing on the drives were INCREDIBLY important to me though losing 8 years of photos is a bit of a blow, everything else can be remade.

My setup USED TO BE a RAID 0+1 of 4 identical WD 640GB blacks, one of them failed and I switched to a single OS drive and the RAID 0. I don't know what prompted me to use a raid again after having a backup drive fail. I'll do some basic recovery attempts and move on again, using my two remaining blacks as cloned singles for all of my data storage. I picked up a Crucial M4 SSD today which I can use as my new primary OS drive and for my favourite games/apps.

Ruckus · August 2012

Make peace with your loss and move on. RAID 0 isn't a true RAID, there's absolutely no redundancy. If you're going to use RAID 0, you need to have a regular backup plan in place (I use a 4 disk RAID 0 for performance, but back it up on a weekly basis to my external drive).

Athenor · August 2012

So you used to be running Raid 10, but one of the disks died and rather than rebuilding it you just dropped down to 0? Yeah... =/

I'd use the program mentioned and see if you get lucky, but be prepared to move on. Also, things like Dropbox auto-syncing photos can go a long way towards protecting investments, depending on just how much stuff you have.

TL DR · August 2012

So does your BIOS have any sort of RAID management, or was this a software RAID set up in Windows? If the former, does the array show up as degraded or rebuilding? Do the individual drives show up as present and healthy?

bowen · August 2012

If there's one thing I've learned in 5 years of working IT work, using RAID for redundancy and loss prevention is an exercise in frustration. (including everything past raid 0)

Have a proper backup procedure in place if your data needs to be restorable. Just future advice.

Mr.Ritz · August 2012

Nothing wrong with using raid 0.. I did for years but I only had games on my drives from steam and never cared if it crashed.

Varinn · September 2012

Late reply as I was on vacation for the last week. I've got my system back up and running off the SSD with my other two working as duplicated data storage. I've accepted losing the pictures and movies, games are already reinstalled and music was luckily saved. I found a copy of my important documents on my gmail account so it seems that everything is mostly back to normal.

On a quite positive note I used the breakdown excuse to somehow convince myself to allow upgrading my 3 year video card to a shiny new XFX HD 7870, I also took great care in cleaning the dust and organizing the cables to improve airflow and try to keep everything cooler in the future. Thanks for the input everyone

WildEEP · September 2012

There are a few utilities on the web that claim to be able to recover portions of a raid 0 failure - you can google it to find it.
Most of what was there however is going to be gone - as a rule of thumb - the "0" in Raid 0 is as much as you an expect to get back in event of a failure.

Nosf · September 2012

As someone above mentioned, Testdisk works pretty damn good. I've used to to recover data now on a couple of client servers, in one case salvaging the OS after the OS partition tanked. I remember being all computer game nerd and running EQ or something off Raid 0 way back when. Ditched it during some upgrade, never bothred with it again.

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