I've been burned.

[Krazy K]

So quite literally I have been burned. I was the lucky victim of a house fire this summer. Lucky referring to the fact that my hard drives (sorta) and clothes survived. No one was home and the house was just about a total loss, but that's what insurance is for.

Here's where I stand. I had a Asus M2N32-sli with the nVidia nForce 590 controller. On that I had a 4x640SE16 RAID5. The problem lies here within.
Once I realized that each controller is unique and that the one on my new board wasn't going to work the process of acquiring a working 4 year board became the daily grind. Found a non working board that Asus fixed for me and a second on craigslist that was in working condition.

Initial boot-up was promising, using the controller I was able to re-create the array and it was visible in bios. Albeit it was only 1.16TB and not the 1.74TB that it would have been with the four drive. Windows recognized the array, again as 1.16TB, but asked me to format the drive to make them usable. I tried using the nVidia synchronize and rebuild features but neither of them were able to complete what ever it is that they did. The software would lock and I was forced into a hard off.

RAID 5 can stand the loss of one drive, but why can't this see that this was a four drive array and pick up on the data? I could care less about the music and movies I have(optimism) on the array, but what I really want are my pictures of friends and family. Is there anyone that would have experience with this or know of a company that will do this. Insurance will pick up the tab, given it isn't an astronomical cost, to have this recovered.

Anything will help. Thank you.

P.S.

A little heartbreak from me to you. Back of drives OFF SITE! Pictures of you're house will come in handy. Desktop in the foreground, BOINC cruncher in the background and my tablet somewhere under the ash.

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x38/fordman32508/2010-07-03203442.jpg

 

[Tharic-Nar]

My sincere sympathies good sir, such a tragic loss, but i'm afraid the news is bad.

You have a RAID 5 made up of 4x 640GB drives. This means that your total storage capacity is equal to n-1, or 3 drives in this case, which equals 1.74TB, the 4th drive is for redundancy (so not 4x 640GB drives, which is approx 2.32TB), but parity data is split over all 4 drives, so any one can be removed and data remains safe, remove 1 drive and you still have a 1.74TB array. What has happened is, you've lost 2 drives to the fire, so you've lost the ability to reclaim parity data, thus you have 2 drives with 2/3 the data (a 1.16TB array). You may be able to reclaim small files; like, below 128 KB, or whatever the RAID cluster size was set to; from the 2 remaining drive with a disk checker and recoverer of some kind (rob might be able to help with that). But you'll need to recover one of the dead drives in order to access the entire array.

I don't know any companies off hand that can reclaim data from a failed RAID array.

Truly sorry.

 

[Krazy K]

I must have forgot to mention that although I know one drive is bad since it doesn't show in bios, but the other three do. That's why I still think there is a good chance that the data is still there, like my ex-, just not giving it up.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Well, try running chkdsk on each drive as a start. Disconnect all but one, boot into an OS, xp, or Win7, check that the drive is recognised, then goto the drive properties, tools, error checking. This will mark off any bad sectors and/or remap them, as well as provide basic data recovery. If you can't detect the drive as a drive letter, it may appear in disk management (win7 - control panel - system and security - admin tools - create and format hard disk partitions), select the drive/properties and try there.

What may of happened is that the disk controller is fine, so found by BIOS, but the platter may be damaged, lost it's MBR or something, so the drive will appear blank, thus not part of the RAID array. Excess heat can demagnetise a platter, in effect, formatting it.

Robs "Too Trim?" article has a few applications mentioned for data recovery... like i said, it won't help with the total array, but it may help with smaller files at least.

http://techgage.com/article/too_trim_when_ssd_data_recovery_is_impossible/3

 

[Rob Williams]

Ugh, man... what can be said? Truly sorry to hear about what happened. It's great that no one was injured, but that's not something I'd wish on anyone. I couldn't imagine the hassle, and of course, the item loss.

I'm not near as familiar with RAID as Jamie is, and he explained it better than I could. This is one reason I refuse to use it, though, because with proper scripts in place, you can store things across multiple drives without RAID, and actually be able to get back some data later in the event that something like this happens.

Well, try running chkdsk on each drive as a start.

To be honest, this is something I would NOT do. Since the drive was part of a RAID array, chkdsk might become confused and end up making the data even more difficult to get. I once ran chkdsk on an external HDD and it completely purged every ounce of data on it. For what reason, I have no idea... but it did.

I'd likely quicker recommend installing one drive at a time and booting up with a live Linux CD, such as Ubuntu. Then you could see if you could access the data in there, and deal with it. Being that the drive was part of a RAID, though, I'm not sure how likely that is going to be.

For data recovery, I have always had good luck with R-Studio, but it's a commercial application, so you'd want to download a trial first before a purchase. For something quick, you could download the testdisk command-line tool (it's a GUI, just in the command-line) and see if you can't manage to find some data that way. That tool in particular is exclusively used for failed partitions, so it might help.

If insurance covers it, you could see if your HDD vendor offers a recovery service. I am quite sure Seagate does.

Good luck man!

http://www.r-studio.com/
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

[Tech-Daddy]

1st, do NOT mess with the drives.

Go to http://www.gillware.com

They can do it. Use my name (Craig Tate from Dallas, Texas) as a referral, and I believe they will quote you the corporate rate.

Do you remember the order of the drives? Which drive was 0,1,2,etc?

You might not need that but I'm sure it is helpful on their end. I had a failed SCSI RAID 5 disk set that they recovered.

Also, know what the RAID controller was when you call, so that they can be sure to have the proper equipment on hand.

Please call them and speak with them. Their prices were less than everyone else I had spoken with, and I have *never* been let down on any recovery job through them, be it corporate or personal referrals.

*HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*

-=TD

PS: I get no commission on this. No payment. This is a sincere recommendation from my experiences with the company. The "use my name as a referral" is something they offered to me so that I could offer people some sort of discount at (what is otherwise) a very uncomfortable time.

 

[Rob Williams]

Or do what TD said. A+ advice.