I have a macpro with 4 internal 1tb drives. 3 of which were formatted as a 3tb raid0 with Disk Utility (I used them for music and video production so speed was important). Just as I was thinking "Hmm.. I better back up some of these files..." I noticed that the raid0 volume began behaving weirdly. I'd get a spinning ball when accessing files, things would slow down very badly and I would have to reboot. After rebooting, things would be fine again, but after accessing several files, I began getting the spinning color wheel again... That was the point when I said, ok I need to try to copy these files now-- but it was too late. When I booted back up, the raid showed up as a mounted volume, however when I opened it, it showed 0 files-- but the funny thing was it still reveals the amount of free space it has (83.45gb). I tried running Disk Utility to repair it, but it gave me the error that the volume could not be ejected / unmounted because it was in use! Even though it was not in use... After trying rebooting a few more times, the raid volume no longer even showed up. Next, I pulled the drives out and put them in firewire 800 enclosures and chained them together-- after messing with the combinations of the drives, the raid mounted again.. Yay! But still 0 files, 83.45 gb free, and when I try to eject it, it says it's in use.
When searching around for solutions to my problem, I learned about R-Studio, and so I installed the mac version and ran it in demo mode (if it proves to be able to recover my data then I will buy it). My device listing showed up as this:
![Image](http://collinatorstudios.com/www/r_studio_device_list.png)
I noticed that the 4th entry under local computer is ST31000333ASCC1F -- 2.73 TB, which is obviously the raid volume, however, I directly under that is the actual physical drive, which does not have any sub-items like the other raid slices do.. I am not sure if this is my problem or what? Should that drive also have a little triangle beside it and an EFI System Partition, Apple_RAID_OfflineV2_Untilted_X and a Booter?
Anyway, so I went up and chose Create Virtual Raid > Create Virtual Block Raid.. I dragged the 2nd ST31000333ASCC1F, and the other two ST31000340ASAD14's. And I got:
![Image](http://collinatorstudios.com/www/r_studio_raid.png)
The properties tab showed:
![Image](http://collinatorstudios.com/www/r_studio_properties.png)
So I went ahead and selected Scan, specified HFS as my file system, set the start to 0, and size to 2.73 TB... I also set the Known File Types to only pull up .png and .jpg-- as I just wanted to see if it could find some pictures... I did the detailed view, and told it to scan.. Immediately after that, I saw my log spitting out over and over and over:
![Image](http://collinatorstudios.com/www/r_studio_log.png)
And I am totally confused.. If I have my settings to raid0, why is it complaining about a raid5 parity? Am I missing something else?
Oh also, I know someone is going to say "you should be using an image rather than your drives".. But I don't have 3tb worth of free space to store a 2.73tb image... I was hoping a simple scan with R-Studio would tell me if it's possible to recover or if it's hopeless.. If it's hopeless, I will move on, but if it's possible I definitely want to work to get the data back...
I should also mention the drives themselves sound fine.. They spin up and spin down, their boot sequence noise sounds normal.. no clicking, no scary sounds..
Anyway, if anyone can give me some insight into what I'm doing wrong and how I might save my volume, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks!
-patrick