Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery (SOLVED!!!)

Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.
CatFish
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Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery (SOLVED!!!)

Post by CatFish » Sun Jul 06, 2014 8:32 pm

Hi

About three days ago, I came home from work to my Alienware M17x laptop with a blue screen. The PC was working fine before I left that morning, but since I came back home it would not boot back up. I couldn't even get into safe mode and when I ran a diagnostics, it claimed a hard drive was failing. I have two OCZ Vertex 4 512 GB SSDs running on raid 0 and I wasn't sure until now which one was dead. I have had them for about 2-3 years. Either way, I felt my data was gone but I had an external drive sitting off in the corner (Western Digital 1.5 TB) with a backup about 2-3 months old.

I decided to plug it into my work laptop I brought home and see how far back I really was even though I didn't lose anything crucial. The drive started to beep and would not mount. After Googling, I found that this symptom means the drive was failing. I could not believe it. Two drives in one day and the external was just sitting off in the corner for months. Since then I have been Googling and researching for days with little sleep trying to find anyway or any software that could help me recover or restore my data.

Ultimately, I came across R-Studio which is why I am here. I downloaded the emergency boot demo and after playing with it for a bit and scanning my partitions/drives, I can see my files. The problem is I'm not sure I how to do is recover them or set the virtual raid properly to make them recoverable. At first, I ran scans to see if I could recover the files manually but I clearly did not know what I was doing. I am using my work laptop to browse, research and use R-Studio. I decided to make an image of both drives and put them on an external HD I purchased from Best Buy the other night. I did the images byte by byte if this matters or not.

When I run a scan and it completes on a drive, most folders and files the ones I want to recover have RED Xs on them. These are from ORANGE recognized entries. Some pictures that I recover show up jumbled up with part of the image displaying, while some files will not display at all. Archives are corrupted and music won't play. I must be halfway there at least I think I am to get this far. I feel I am missing a simple step because my files are right in front of me. I can see the names of the files, directories and size at this point. I think I need to setup a virtual raid and possibly make an image of that, then try to recover.

Worst case scenario for me is I replace the bad drive and get assistance restoring the images I have or Best Buy can recover something from the external I gave them to repair.

Thanks for reading.

Alienware M17X
2X 512GB OCZ 4 Vertex SSD on RAID 0
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
rs01.jpg
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Last edited by CatFish on Sun Jul 13, 2014 1:13 pm, edited 5 times in total.

CatFish
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery PLEASE HELP

Post by CatFish » Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:01 pm

I did some more research and I noticed my problem is somewhat similar to what is in this thread.

http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=23238&start=

I did try a virtual raid once, but I'm not sure I put the drives in the correct order or if configured it correctly. In the above screen shot, I added them to a virtual raid in the order they are in now, but according to that thread I should put the one with the partitions first if I read it correctly. My pictures showed up jumbled as well. After my scans complete, I'll try and swap them around on a raid but before I do that I want to know what raid option I should select. This may not even have anything to do with my problem, but I do know my pictures were jumbled.

Also here is with my laptop shows when I boot up.

Before this, it would say error on the bad drive as opposed to offline but the stripe was working. Sometimes the second drive would be normal but it still would not boot into Windows. I'm not even sure the drive is really bad because the results on startup are mixed, but most of the time it is what I see in above screen. I even put the drives I got with the laptop (which is a 2-3 year old backup) in and the stripe still fails, but one of the drives list as a NON-MEMBER of the raid in the same HDD slot as the bad one for the SSD.
rs02.jpg
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Corsari
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Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by Corsari » Mon Jul 07, 2014 3:00 am

Hello unfortunately you have "decided" to multiply by 4 the chances to kill / loose your data.

SSDs are affordable like the thumb/pen drives, so there are all but affordable, even worse than worse 80% of SSDs are driven by a Sandforce controller or by some one else that transparently encrypt the flash chips and for this reason also asking to a service like

Pen drive data recovery service

where they remove the flash chips and dump their content to next reassemble the whole SSD image, they can't succeed because of the encryption made by the controller.

Don't think about moving chips onto the same healthy SSD (a working donor), because the encryption key is factory randomly changed for very single SSD.

Because (for Sandforce) it is a double 256 bit key, either using all the big G computers, it would take some decades to decrypt them.

REMEMBER : SSDs are for system performances ONLY! Unless you don't practice a rigorous backup policy since they abandon you without warning signs (like HDDs do)

---

Second you have placed your valuable data onto a RAID 0 which again is a system for system performances ONLY, so again indicated for operating system, programs, temp paths and virtual memory.

For the simple reason that loosing one of the drives, will make the user to loose all his/her valuable data.

Resuming : the only chance is to fix (if encrypted) or recover the missing ssd and next see if it can be re used in your system or to take advantage of R-Studio's tools to rebuild the lost RAID 

There is a third possibility, but usually it requires and it can be applied to a little bunch of SSDs' controllers: an FW issue. For this issue, special data recovery devices are needed and they (at the current date) can fix only certain controllers.‎

Kind regards‎
Robert
Technical Manager @ Recupero Dati RAID FAsTec (Italy)

USEFUL RULES and GUIDELINES
1) What to check BEFORE begin a disk image/clone process [link]
2) Disks that are too slow while imaging/cloning them [link]
3) All my posts on this forum [link]

CatFish
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Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:27 am

Right now I have images of both the drives and I need help putting them together to recover the files if that is possible or not.

CatFish
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Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:30 pm

In the properties of my drive images, it list the index block size. Is that the block size I set in the Virtual Block Raid?

CatFish
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Wed Jul 09, 2014 8:54 am

So yesterday I setup the virtual raid block again with the images, but I set the block size to 4KB which is indicated under the properties for my drives in R-Studio. I stopped the scan mid way on the image, because it was set for 2 Days to complete and I was going to set parameters for to scan to speed it up. When I checked what it managed to scan during the time it ran, my user profile where all my files were on DID NOT have a RED X on it. I tried to recover a file, but it gave me another error that I can't recall but different than what I have been getting. I think I may have it now. I started the scan again and I would know by now except Windows updates rebooted my PC in the middle of the night and I had to start it again this morning.

I'll know later this afternoon how the scan turns out.

CatFish
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Wed Jul 09, 2014 3:01 pm

So the deep scan finished today finally and I still had no red Xs on the directories I wanted to recover, but when I tried to open a file from a recognized partition it would still not open. My only guess now is that I put the drives in the wrong order when I created the virtual raid block. When I open a recognized partition, I get a lot of record child mismatch aborting and Fixup 1/2 errors which from what I have been researching means the drives are in the wrong order. Hopefully, putting the drives in the correct order will resolve the issue.

Can anyone chime in and let me know if I am making progress or not?

Thanks

CatFish
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Thu Jul 10, 2014 7:46 am

So I've tried creating the block raid with drives in both orders and I'm still getting MFT mismatch and fixup errors. My pictures recover successfully, but some are jumbled up while some appear perfectly. None of my games open. The only thing I can think of is the block size is incorrect, since I have created two Virtual block raids with each drive being in a different order. Opening the drive files for different recognized partitions yields different results each time, but all of them give me mismatch errors. I'm going to try and reach out to the vendor today and see if they can give me a different block size and try to make the raid that way.

If the block size is incorrect, would this cause some problems?
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Alt
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Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by Alt » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:37 am

I think you can try this free software: ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery to detect RAID 0 parameters.

CatFish
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Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: Alienware M17X: Raid 0 Recovery

Post by CatFish » Fri Jul 11, 2014 2:40 pm

Alt wrote:I think you can try this free software: ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery to detect RAID 0 parameters.
Thanks for this. I will certainly try this later on today.

I get mixed results every time I change block size and disk order. The closest I got to recovering anything was with a 4KB block size with the disk in the default order they appear in the screens. It was the first time the folders did not have RED Xs on them. Some of my files recovered completely, but I still got some MFT and mismatch errors. Some pictures recovered, but were jumbled.

Hopefully this will help me set the right parameters and get a scan without those errors.

Thanks

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