Mac Raid 0 recovery (Fantom MDC1000)

[jvcleave]

THE QUESTION:
Since my MacPro supports Raid 0 with internal disks can I somehow repair a failed drive and rebuild the array?


A few tech specs and background

Fantom MDC1000 (External Firewire 800/400/ USB, 2 500GB striped as 1TB drive)
Mac Pro
Mac OS X 10.6

I had this drive array plugged in via Firewire 800 when an application stated it could no longer access it. After a few reboots/power cycling and the drives were no longer being accessed. During this process there were clicking sounds.

The drive would not show up when plugged in via Firewire 800/400 but under USB it would show in Disk Utility as 0 bytes and Snow Leopard wanted to initialize it. Called Fantom who suggested the Firewire chip went bad and I should be able to recover with Diskwarrior when plugged in via USB. No luck there.

So in a last ditch effort to avoid an estimated $2000 recovery charge I pulled the drives from the enclosure and inserted one (referring to it as "Drive1") of them into Drive Bay 3.

Hey, It mounted! And even though it is just a 500GB drive it is showing up as 975GB. Using cp -Rv in the terminal (so I/O errors wouldn't stop the copying) and I was able to extract quite a few older files but was getting I/O errors for many recent ones.

So I put Drive2 in the third bay but no such luck, this drive wants to be initialized.

So on the failed Drive2 I have ran TestDisk and got this:

Code:

Disk /dev/disk2 - 500 GB / 465 GiB - CHS 976773168 1 1                                                         
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors                                               
Structure: Ok.

[drc]

Data is interleaved on the two disks. To recover anything you will have to use some software or something to de-interleave it.

[jvcleave]

Thanks for the reply. Any recommendations on software to de-interleave it?

[radiogavin]

Hi there, jvcleave. I have basically the same problem. Did you ever find a good solution?

Regards,

Rob H

[jvcleave]

I used this to get some data back http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

[dmarques]

Hi,

You can use something like winhex to find raid config and destripe it.
But it's not so easy if you are not used to it.

[dmarques]

What data did you recovered with that?

[radiogavin]

Thanks much for the software tip. I'll give it a go (as I don't have the ~$1K+ to drop on an outfit with a clean room), and I'll report back.

[loki]

winhex doesn't support hfs etc its part of x-ways
http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/comparison.html

X-ways forensics does but it costs EUR 1019.90


R-Studio for mac http://www.r-tt.com/data_recovery_macintosh/
R-Studio for windows http://www.data-recovery-software.net/D ... load.shtml


Loki