SSD RAID RECOVERY

[konkon]

Hello Guys,

I have been given an ssd raid extracted from a Sony Vaio VPCZ1. The raid was raid 0 and it failed.

I am trying to find a way to connect this raid onto another pc and see if I can recover any data, and I am at a loss of what kind of connectors-adapters perhaps raid cards to use.

The model number of each of the 2 drives is RAID LIF 256GB MLC SEC-Q-56GSLIMRAID4(B).

These must be a special kind of lif connector because the ribbon that connects to them is much less than 20.5mm which the standard size for zif/lif adapter.

Both ssd's are connected to eachother with another ribbon that acts as a raid card and its width is larger than 20.5mm .

I am really unsure as to what to try.

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.

Attachments

[N.C.]

you should use a SATA cable to solder to the board, but as i can see, this is not a simple sata, because have too many communication pairs.
Maybe sata 3?

[dick]

Hi, Is the laptop still working?
I would put it all back together in the laptop and boot from an external hard disk with tools loaded or from a cd.

[fzabkar]

There are 4 SATA drives on 2 boards in RAID 0.

[konkon]

Dear All,

Thank you fzabkar and dick. Indeed there are 4 drives. The laptop initially would not boot at all, however it now does.

Once you boot it up it shows that there are 4 drives and the raid has failed. Since, I would like to use RAID Reconstructor or other similar software,

I tried building several Bart PE and UBCD4Win compilations with the added raid drivers and the required software which is almost always led to a blue screen.

When I tried to use the default drivers that come with UBCD4Win UBCD booted but in raid reconstructor, I could only see 2 drives one of 128 GB capacity and one of 512.

So, I know that the drives are being recognized in the raid card, but cannot access them.

Any help or advice would be highly appreciated.

[konkon]

Any advice?

[ici_lemmy]

If you cannot find a way to access the user data, with time and money, what i would do is unsolder the chips and try to rebuild everything !

[hddguy]

what i would do is unsolder the chips and try to rebuild everything !

Realistically this will be extremely difficult. As is RAID 0 the data is striped 4 ways at whatever block size is configured. The individual NAND chips themselves operate in a similar fashion where blocks are split and joined interleaved with adjacent chips. Identifying any internal mixes of the data will be very difficult. Also, there can be many assembly complications that can potentially result in incomplete images or conflicting blocks in which the wrong blocks will be assembled. Generally simple to solve when you have a filesystem, data and associated system counters to work with, but as each SSD contains striped data and is not a complete volume this is not an option.

If you could get a working model of this SSD and make some research into its internal structure and assembly parameters in order to recover you could maybe replicate the solution against each SSD individually.

Ideally you would want to 'bridge' a SATA connection to each of the SSD devices and access this way. But this is working on the assumption that all 4 are infact accessible and operational.

[waynejci]

@Konkon, did you ever get this resolved? I've got a similar situation with the exact same model drives. Can't get it to boot but would like to attach the drive/s to an external source like you do with regular hard drives to see if I can recover lost files, but I can't find and enclosure that will fit the drive.