RAID0 Recovery Help
Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2021 6:50 pm
Hello,
Hoping someone can help me. Yes, I'm a newb. I had a drive array in an external eSATA port-multiplied enclosure with four 1TB SATA drives (WD Caviar Green, if that matters). I got it hooked up to my Mac via PCIe-to-Thunderbolt chassis and could read the array as a MacOS RAID0 disk. I tried copying my files over to a new external drive. It failed any time I left the computer for a while. (dumb-thing number 1: I should have checked my Mac power savings settings, but oh well).
So, I popped the drives in a USB-based enclosure, but (dumb-thing number 2) I didn't realize it was a hardware based enclosure, so it overwrote the RAID partition info on the drives, so now they were no longer recognized as a RAID Array by Mac. I did notice this quickly, and the drive activity LED indicators didn't blink for more than a few seconds on boot-up, so I don't think it did more than overwrite the boot partitions.
Then, I put the drives back in the original enclosure, fired up R-Studio and made "byte-for-byte" uncompressed disk images of 3 out of 4 of them. Drive number 4 would constantly report errors when trying to do so, so I loaded up Disk Drill, which seemingly made it past whatever was hanging up R-Studio, and made a "byte-for-byte" .DMG backup.
Then, I loaded each of those on to a Virtual Block RAID, selected RAID0 but didn't change any other settings in the Parents tab, hit "Scan for Partition" which I cancelled when it looked like it found one - it did. I clicked to View Files on the Recognized0 partition and BOOM! there's all my files! However, the few I tried recovering were unreadable by the relevant software (video, final cut and audio files). I'm now running a "Scan" on the Virtual Block RAID item. It's seeing a lot more information according to the block display, but has a while to go.
My questions are:
- Other than the dumb-things above, did I take the correct recovery steps?
- Should I have done more with the Auto-detect RAID settings (it estimated it would take 3 days to do)
- Can I somehow "repair" the bad sectors or whatever was causing issues with Drive Number 4, then use that repaired image on the Virtual Block RAID for better recovery results?
Any advice would be appreciated. I'm in a bit more of a time crunch than allowing days at a time for processing allows - if I'm taking the wrong steps.
Thanks in advance.
Hoping someone can help me. Yes, I'm a newb. I had a drive array in an external eSATA port-multiplied enclosure with four 1TB SATA drives (WD Caviar Green, if that matters). I got it hooked up to my Mac via PCIe-to-Thunderbolt chassis and could read the array as a MacOS RAID0 disk. I tried copying my files over to a new external drive. It failed any time I left the computer for a while. (dumb-thing number 1: I should have checked my Mac power savings settings, but oh well).
So, I popped the drives in a USB-based enclosure, but (dumb-thing number 2) I didn't realize it was a hardware based enclosure, so it overwrote the RAID partition info on the drives, so now they were no longer recognized as a RAID Array by Mac. I did notice this quickly, and the drive activity LED indicators didn't blink for more than a few seconds on boot-up, so I don't think it did more than overwrite the boot partitions.
Then, I put the drives back in the original enclosure, fired up R-Studio and made "byte-for-byte" uncompressed disk images of 3 out of 4 of them. Drive number 4 would constantly report errors when trying to do so, so I loaded up Disk Drill, which seemingly made it past whatever was hanging up R-Studio, and made a "byte-for-byte" .DMG backup.
Then, I loaded each of those on to a Virtual Block RAID, selected RAID0 but didn't change any other settings in the Parents tab, hit "Scan for Partition" which I cancelled when it looked like it found one - it did. I clicked to View Files on the Recognized0 partition and BOOM! there's all my files! However, the few I tried recovering were unreadable by the relevant software (video, final cut and audio files). I'm now running a "Scan" on the Virtual Block RAID item. It's seeing a lot more information according to the block display, but has a while to go.
My questions are:
- Other than the dumb-things above, did I take the correct recovery steps?
- Should I have done more with the Auto-detect RAID settings (it estimated it would take 3 days to do)
- Can I somehow "repair" the bad sectors or whatever was causing issues with Drive Number 4, then use that repaired image on the Virtual Block RAID for better recovery results?
Any advice would be appreciated. I'm in a bit more of a time crunch than allowing days at a time for processing allows - if I'm taking the wrong steps.
Thanks in advance.