Hello all,

I'll try to make this as brief as possible to save you all from eye fatigue. I had (2) 500gb Maxtor 7200.11 drives (yes, basically rebadged Seagate drives with the firmware problem) running in Raid 0 config for about 3 months (yes, I know, Raid 0, dumb). Long story short, the one night I decided to shut down my computer, I booted it up the next day to have intermittent issues accessing one of the 2 drives.

Fast forward to now...both drives were flashed with the latest firmware. Ran spinrite on both individually, one drive being perfect and the other exhibiting large chunks of bad sectors.

So I ran a Level 2 scan on the bad drive on spinrite. I know level 2 has like 5 different scan options but I used the default (recover data, I believe). Took about 30 hours on the 500gb drive, but it completed successfully after finding about 15 or so 'uncorrectable bad blocks) scattered accross the drive.

So I plugged both drives in on a working system with raid disabled, and booted into windows and tried running BOTH Zero Assumption Recovery AND GetDataBack for NTFS on the raid array. Both programs were able to correctly identify the raid partitions and progress on both showed that the files were being found...BUT, on BOTH programs, after about 55 percent or so progress, they would throw some weird read errors and if I chose to 'continue and ignore' the computer would just freeze, and reboot. What the heck?? I thought spinrite repaired bad sectors or at least marked them bad so that windows programs wouldn't try to access them? I've tried to run the recovery programs again, with the same reboot results. Seems as though they're running into a bad sector batch and the drive just goes haywire and causes the pc to reboot.

Can someone PLEASE suggest what my best bet is at this point? Would HDDGenerator do anything different or more beneficial for me that spinrite didn't? Remember again, the problem is just on ONE drive in a raid 0 array. Sucks. Or should I have chosen a different spinrite level 2mode when scanning? Or maybe run a spinrite level 4 scan?

I don't have any money to do professional data recovery....

Thanks much in advance!

Oh no at this point you have done your part and Spinrite has completed the job.

^^ So are you implying that at this point there's nothing else I can do and it's a lost cause? I thought spinrite was supposed to mark the bad sectors so that no matter what program tries to access any part of the disk in the future will never have a problem?

Spinrite is horrible for data and should never ever ever ever ever be run on a drive that has anything on it you care about.

At this point I'd say your only option before sending it off to a pro would be to image the bad drive (both really, if you can) and then use the image to try to pull your data out of instead of the known bad drive.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Spinrite is as good for hard drives as acid is for flowers. As for running HDD Regenerator, thats like pissing on the flowers to wash the acid off. I suggust you do some proper research and consult a pro to save the data before you try something else stupid. Sometimes you just have to be blunt about things.

Hard Drive Spray works much better than Spinrite or HDDregerator.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

lol well apparently (news to me) according to you guys spinrite is terrible on a harddrive? Well, kinda too late for that now haha.

Anyways, yes I'm 99 percent sure it's the damaged drive itself causing the reboot since it only reboots when accessing the damaged sectors and once threw a MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION bluescreen.


Ok, now for my last question. What is the best software for imaging an ntfs drive that is part of a raid 0 array? The raid 0 part is the key here, since I'm only going to be imagining that damaged drive. I already have the new harddrive ready for imaging, but just need to find out what is the best software for going about doing this (and software that won't reboot/bsod while imaging a drive with extreme bad sectors).

Thanks!

Yes, Spinrite was a really bad move. In general, if someone claims to be able to walk on water, fly through the air like superman, pull large pieces of furniture from a body orifice, repair a broken drive with software, and other impossible tasks, I'd tend not to believe them. As for imaging, RAID0,1, etc does not matter. An image is an exact copy of the drive, and doesn't care what data is on it. Your choices range from $3500 for a Deepspar imager, down to running DD in Linux. If your drive crashes the computer, a software-only imager may not be much help. I doubt you'll listen, but I have to recommend taking it to a professional. It will likely be cheaper than purchasing the right tool yourself, and you can avoid any more spinrite mistakes.

Thanks again, oh well...live and learn. I have basically 75 percent of my internet life on that comp (of which probably 40 percent were backed up on dvd's over the years)...so if I lose it all, it'll hurt, but not life threatening. I'm just going to suck it up and bought a single 1tb drive, and I'm going to attempt to image the entire 1tb raid array onto it using acronis in dos (hopefully more stable than windows cloning due to driver issues,e tc) and pray that it will transfer over successfully so I can use getdataback on it and retrieve some if not most of the contents.

Thanks again

If you value your data, you'd better invest in (2) 1 TB drives . . . I don't think they are very reliable.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Thanks, but actually the single (1) terrabyte drive is solely just to transfer the raid array to...I have (2) seperate new 500 gb drives that will be used to store the data on, in a psuedo raid 1 redunancy manner (with dvd backups too). If anything, this whole experience has just opened my eyes to the lack of quality in drives as capacity becomes larger and prices continue to fall.

samsung-hd501lj-t11165.html

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My Forum

Image the bad drive to one of these, and THEN mess with the RAID. It will make your life a lot easier.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

It is hard.
If the PC reboots with your bad drive in, you need special hw complex to image this drive.
It looks like all the way you need professional help.

Regards,
Janos

Thanks, but if the dos-level cloning doesn't work, im just going to chalk this one up as a loss and forget this all happened. I just dont have the 1000+ dollars for professional recovery (probably way more for about 800gb of data)

Can anyone suggest to me what is the best dos level drive cloning software when it comes to handling/ignoring bad sectors? I know some are better than others, but just curious what you guys suggest with all your experience before I try.

Thanks!

Close this thread !! Close this thread !!!!!

Spinrite

dd_rescue / ddrescue, you'll need a linux machine and/or livecd for that.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.