Tech advice on hard drive crash

My nephew sent this to me, can anyone offer tech advice? Thanks.

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I hope with your connections you can help me out. Our hard drive crashed this week. I have no idea how/why. I just checked it about two weeks ago for data integrity and everything passed with flying colors. Then BAM….can't access the drives!

Our system is a RAID 0 system. This means that we have 2 hard drives that split the data between them (1/2 of a file on one drive, 1/2 of the file on the other drive). This greatly increases the data access speeds. Unfortunately this also causes some severe issues when they die….you need both to access your data. If one HD fails you loose everything!!! :( :(

Do you know anybody that deals in Data Recovery that might be able to help us out? I'm currently trying to use SPINRITE 6 (www.grc.com). Unfortunately its got 160 more hours to go (at its current rate). Its finding A LOT of problems on the drive and I'm not sure if I'll be able to boot them after this system is done running. If I can, I'm all set as I'll put a new HD in the box and copy everything. If I can't then I need the help of a professional data recovery team.

One issue I do have is that there are some files on those drives that may not be deemed legal. I've got a few movies backed up, MP3's and more that could red flag those drives depending on how close somebody looks at them.

All I really want is all my pictures and financial items back. That's about 200MB of data. Everything else I can rebuild over about 2~3 weeks, but the financial records date back 6 years! That would take months to put back into the system.

I know, why didn't I back up the machine! The ironic thing on that? I was going to this weekend. Chris and I had just talked about it a couple weeks ago. I was planning on getting a Firewire External HD and dump the data, I was also going to put the data on DVD. Somebody knew something!

data recovery services are VERY expensive (in the thousands to 10s of thousands range) and they will never guaranty that they work either...they subscribe to the pay and pray model! And usually chances are slim that they will recover any/all of your data. I am sure that they sign non-disclosure agreements as usually they do this type of work for companies that are willing to pay big $$ for recovery, so at least you don't have to worry about that.

FYI, as I mentioned in Bec's thread the other day, RAID 0 is suicide as it offers no redundancy at all and you have twice the chance that one disk will fail causing you to lose all your data. For your next purchase, think RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 10 (dual, mirrored RAID0 disk sets). And ALWAYS make sure you are using hardware RAID as software RAID is near impossible to recover.

Good luck!

cheers,
Luke

The discs spin and can apparently read and write sectors, which is a really good sign. Those sorts of drive failures are a lot easier to correct.

Luke is right, recovering a failed RAID-0 array is difficult and extremely expensive if one of the drives have actually failed, but it sounds like perhaps it's a problem with the file allocation table (FAT).

Spinrite is an excellent tool and will attempt to repair any damaged sectors.

There's another product that has been a lifesaver for us several times. It's called Get Data Back, made by Runtime.org. I have no idea if it will help with a RAID-0 array, but Jody, the guy at Runtime who wrote the software, is fairly accessible and will be able to tell you if his software can be made to work. Get Data Back has worked for us on many drives where the FAT has gotten trashed, it actually looks at the files on the disc and rebuilds the FAT, where Spinrite will only look at individual sectors that can't be read and try and read them a bazillion times, then rewrite the data if it is successful in reading it.

As for data recovery, if there's iffy stuff on there, I'd be very careful. I believe that the data recovery places are obligated to report anything they find that is suspicious.