Data Recovery After Revodrive Installation

[melacon]

This is/was my first experience with data recovery/loss. I had been lucky in my life, that the only time I had lost a hdd was a member of my Raid 0+1. Unfortunately, my initial indications were that the same halves of the array were lost, making recovery of any data impossible. Here's what happened and how I fixed it.

I bought a Revodrive after my SSD failed after about 8 months of use. I thought the failure was due to multiple power outages, prompting me to get a UPS. Once the Revo was in and W7 Pro installed, I noticed my Intel Raid manager was reporting a failed volume. Strangely, all four of my member drives showed up in Disk Management, but two of them appeared to not be members anymore. For what ever reason, it just seemed like the raid had dropped them out for no reason, other than to give me a heart attack and destroy the array. My next thought was not that the Revo had caused this, but the power issues I had had.

BIOS and POST showed the same; all four member disks were detected by the computer, but 2 of them were not a part of the raid somehow. I tried any combination of removing drives, BIOS settings, etc, with no change. So I emailed some data recovery companies and started poking around for software. I also noticed that when either of the two drives that had remained in the raid were still physically attached to the computer, Windows had a noticeable lag at startup. Accessing these drives with free programs like WinHex or Raid Reconstructor was a very slow and entirely full of bad sectors. Yikes!

I was confused by all these indications, whether it was a physical failure, or a logical corruption. The data recovery quoted did not make me feel much better. Anywhere from $1,000 to $7,500! I continued to look for help on forums, until I was given another suggestion. Ultimately, it was hhansard on the OCZ forums who set me on the path to full recovery.

First thing was to remove the revo drive and do a fresh install to a sata drive. Luckily, I had one laying around. My old, launch day PS3 60gb hdd that I had replaced. Slow as snot, but worked in a pinch. Once I got W7 installed and updated, I turned to Raid Labs Raid Recovery freeware version. Days of analysis with Raid Reconstructor were fruitless, yet Raid Recovery listed recoverable files within minutes. Hope returned! From there, it was a matter of playing musical hdds, creating the new raid with four new Samsung Spinpoint 2TB disks and transferring the data off the old "broken, failed" array. It was no harder than transferring data from a thumb drive to the hard drive. The data was not corrupted in the least. Every file that I have looked at so far has been perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened.

Turns out, the Revodrive is not the most friendly with Intel's raid controller, especially in large format raid apps like a 0+1. I wish I had known this, but OCZ isn't exactly very forthcoming with that type of information. Hopefully, if anyone out there has a similar issue with a Revo install, they find this post and calm their heart palpatations. I know I was pretty angry for a week or so while I figure this out!

[Vulcan]

Glad you got your data back. Since you didn't include a link to it, and for the benefit of the archives and searchers, you've been mostly summarising this thread here:

http://forum.hddguru.com/revodrive-asus-sabertooth-x58-intel-raid-t18777.html

I don't understand why it needed a whole new thread for that summary, instead of you posting on the original thread, but anyway...