Hi guys, thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

I have a 1 TB striped raid 0 composed of two 500 GB Maxtor Diamondmax drives. At least once a month I would check the "health" of all my drives and everything has always come up healthy. Suddenly over the weekend, on a reboot, the bios in the raid controller reported an error on one of the drives, and when windows booted up, the raid volume was inaccessible and it reported one of the drives missing.

I pulled the drive out of my system and am running HDD Regenerator on it. So far it's only 135 MB into the drive and it's found hundreds of bad sectors but only repaired 12. It's been going for about 24 hours now and still is only 135 MB in. I would think it was frozen except the numbers are changing.

My hope is to let HDD Regenerator finish (who KNOWS how long it will take) and then put the drive back in the raid and immediately try to pull the data off the volume. Is this a proper course of action? Should I be using different software, Spinrite perhaps?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

The first thing to do is STOP HDD Regenerator. You want to image the drive first. I'm not particularly familiar with HDD Regenerator, but I've seen too many recoveries completely ruined by programs that claim to fix the drive in some way (I don't trust Spinrite either). If you make an image, and then mess up the image with some utility, you can hopefully make another image. If you screw up the original drive with no backup, your data is gone.

I have tried to make an image but since the drive is from a raid, none of the image utilities could detect a valid partition and I haven't been able to find anything that would simply image the raw drive. Anything you could recommend?

Thanks again for the help!

What you need is a raw image of every sector, not a utility like Ghost or Acronis. Ghost looks at the file structure. Media Tools Pro is highly recommended on here, but if you need something free, you can do it with DD_Rescue on a Linux Live Boot CD.

The drive that is developing bad sectors is probably going to fail : could be overheating, a power supply problem or a weak head/unstable recording (I bet this option).
The healty of the drives you mean at RAID start is a simple checking of the raid structure and maybe a SMART startus check, but if the drive has developed hard errors in the middle because of unstable recording, even SMART could be OK but the data is damaged (it happended to me many times).
HDDreg I think is useless.
Try hard imaging the drive with a specialised tool , don't expect to get the data back especially where HDDreg has worked, and, by the way, remember that such high density drives are more prone to develop defects and fail rather than lower capacity.
The drive must be re-certified , maybe could help but it's beyond your possibility if you don't have specialised tools. Don't rely on SW tools that claim are able to "regenerate surface" or "reallocate defects" if you want a reliable RAID system again.

Hmm, cloning the drive doesn't seem to be working. The imaging hangs on cylinder 274.

Thanks for the info. I don't want to put this drive back into operation, only temporarily to get the data off onto a new single 1TB drive. I'm just going to let media tools do it's thing... Right now it says there are over 5000 hours remaining but I'm hoping that's going to change.

Maybe reverse cloning (from last cyl. to .... 275) could help - if applicable.
The time remaining is dependent on the condition of the drive, I hope this will change, too (5000 hrs. are too much )

Hehe, reverse cloning is giving me an ETA of 800,000 hours now. Is there a way to turn off the error retrying?

I'm no raid expert but its obvious the drive will be killed before you have enough of the image to make it worthwhile.
Make a note of the problem sectors and then shut down.
You need to find another way or another utility.
Maybe R studio would be good here.
Also I have had great results imaging bad drives with the free Copyr.dma utility.

Hi,

your drive needs at least 2 things:
1: cooling,
2: a good imaging program that accesses the drive directly (not through a driver to control retry).

this latter is the harder to implement, I don't know about free or cheap progs to do this.
Also it is desirable to turn off HW retries and defect relocation and skip badly damaged areas in the first pass.
Since these requirements are not easy to fulfill, I would rather recommend taking the array to a pro before the drive dies completely.

regards,
pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

How about expensive programs?

What is the best imaging software you can get?

I know hardware imagers like DeepSpar do a good job, but what is the best software only solution at any cost?

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http://www.ancilesecurity.com

@ vrocco

HW solutions are just controllers driven by software. You can obtain the same results with software, without specialized controllers (every brand has different behaviour but all the "imagers" rely on different implementation of READ LONG command).
Anyone of you has done some experimenting with ATA commands for reading bad sectors or switching off the HDD ECC/retry/auto reallocation features etc. ?

Let's face it, if you continue running software on your drive, you WILL kill it and then your data is out the window. It was a bad enough idea to be running RAID-0 on data that you would consider valuable, so to be experimenting with free software is only compounding your problem. If you need your data, you either need the appropriate equipment, such as Deepspar, or you need to take that drive to a pro. You have already tried MediaTools and it ain't doing the trick, so take some realistic advice and forget the DIY approach. Sorry to be harsh, but I had a customer who did his own head swap on a multi-platter Maxtor in a dirty environment and then came crying for help. Know your limits, and if the data is valuable, turn it off and send it to somebody who is up to the task.

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Data Recovery Ireland

The data is not all that valuable. I can recreate it in a couple of days, less time than it will take to send the drive for recovery. My goal here is to recover it for the purposes of learning rather than getting the data back.

Fair enough comment!

Try my suggestions. R Studio can be easily set up for one read retry before moving to the next sector. This is instead of the usual 32 attempts for each bad using Media tools.

The Copyr.dma utility is also worth a try. It automatically skips the bad sectors. Might still take a few days to complete a full image. You would directly image to a replacement drive. I'm not sure how or even if it works with a Sata drive or if you need to use ide interface adapters etc. Its worth a play!
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Har ... -DMA.shtml
Info says 128gb drive limit and Sata not supported. Still with a sata to ide adapter it should work.
Attached is a pic of the last time I used it on a crashed drive. The damaged areas are clearly seen. Some but not all data was recovered.

Thanks for the info dick!

I downloaded copyr.dma but like you said I'll need a sata to ide adaptor... and even then the drive is 500gb so I'm not sure if it's going to read anything above 128 (or if it'll see anything at all!)

Also downloaded the trial of R Studio. I already plunked down some cash for media tools so I really want to check it out before I spend some more money again!

I'll try it later this afternoon and will post any results here.

Thanks again to everyone for your responses!

Hmm, a strange observation as I handle the drive. If I have the power cable connected with no data and just have the drive powered on, it's making a "normal" clicking noise (not the click of death noise, but the normal noise a drive makes when it's reading/writing). The pattern in which it's making these noises makes the drive sound like it does in normal operation... Like if I'm saving a large file. It's very active, even with no data connected to it.

There is no click of death.

Weird!

Because of this and because EVERY sector seems to be damaged while the drive worked perfectly mere minutes before it "crashed," do you think it could be the onboard controller on the drive that may have gone bad? Just a guess... What do you guys think?

Ah, welp, game over. Definitely not the controller.

I decided to move the drive over to another machine, so I could use my main system for something else in the meantime. Even when gently carrying it, when I stopped moving I could hear the platters scraping inside the drive. Good bye data.

Thanks to everyone who posted a response, I learned a lot despite the fact that the data is gone. I wish you all the best in all your endeavors.