Rescuing RAID 0
25. August 2009 by admin.
If you’re familiar with RAIDs (redundant array of independent disks,) you’ll know that RAID 0, or striped set offers the fastest hard drive input and output for playing games, capturing and editing digital video, or accessing any large database or file. You’ll also know that it places the data in the riskiest position, as failure of either or any drive in the array will render the data inaccessible and possibly lost for good. Thus, with your data saved in a RAID 0, it’s extremely imperative to have a good backup plan in place.
My summer RAID outing came two weeks ago, when a new customer called and said his Dell desktop wouldn’t boot. It sounded like a typically corrupted or failing hard disk, so rather than make a house call, I told him to unplug everything and drop it off here (where I usually will boot to Knoppix and try to backup the data before running disk diagnostics; chkdsk; virus removal; or possible replacement of the HD.) When the customer arrived in my driveway I had to sympathize: it was a behemoth Dell XPS 9xx something or other, weighing in at about 70 or 80 lbs with two SATA hard disks in a RAID 0, and two Nvidia 8800 GTXs in SLI formation. Did I mention it was freaking heavy?
We wrestled it into my kitchen and I began my analysis. Booting Knoppix showed two hard drives with unknown file system. I pressed F12 and booted the Dell diagnostic. Drive 0 consistently showed read errors, while Drive 1 was good. I knew it needed at least one hard drive, but which was which? The diagnostic does show the drive serial number so I jotted that down in case SATA 1 was other than Drive 0. Then I checked the service tag for warranty info. Voila— it’s covered for at least two more years!
I called and got Dell to offer the HD, but they wanted some personal ID from the customer which I didn’t have. I proceeded to boot Acronis Drive Image to try and clone the striped volume to an external 500GB USB drive. Got about ten percent and it stuck on those damned read errors. A second attempt yielded the same result, so I switched tactics. This time I ran Acronis Backup to select just the user directories and saved those to a backup file on the external drive.
While waiting for the customer to call back I thought about the situation: Dell will give him one 250GB SATA drive, but he had a 500GB array and the other 250GB drive might not be long for this world either. Because this was just a home PC, not a gaming box, I decided to go buy one 500GB SATA drive and forget about the RAID. Later that night I pulled out my Dell XP Pro SP3 disc. After rummaging through a few Intel SATA driver floppies, I finally had XP installing on the new drive, just happy that this RAID would leave the customer with more than zero.