Hi,

I hope this is the right forum to ask this question. Please let me know if not. I am looking for some advice about what to do next in my mission to recover the data from my RAID0 SSDs.

Background:

MY laptop is an Alienware m18 R2, with two 2 TB SanDisk/Western Digital PC SN8000S NVMe SSDs, configured as Intel RAID 0, 3.7 TB array.

In May, I received an email from Dell suggesting that I should install a firmware update on these drives:

Since I didn't have anywhere to back up 4TB of data, I was afraid to apply this patch, just in case it bricked the drives. Well, now I'm sorry because this week, while I was using the machine, I suddenly got an error that Windows had to restart. After that, the machine wouldn't boot, and I'm in this mess.

The BIOS detects both drives, correctly reporting their P/N and S/N. RAID metadata reports ARRAY0 as Normal, but both physical drives report "Error Occurred". WinRE cannot see the array even after loading iaStorVD.inf.

I carefully removed the two drives from the machine, labelling them so I could put them back in the same slots later. I inserted two new 256GB NVMEs, and powered on. The BIOS does not show an error with the new drives, so I believe that the problem is with the drives, not the motherboard. Although, is it strange that both drives failed at the exact same time? I guess same conditions, same fault.

What is strange is that this firmware problem is supposed to be triggered by the drives coming out of low power mode. However, the fault happened while the machine had been powered on for more than an hour. It was hot from playing a game. When I opened it up, I did discover that one of the fans was completely clogged with dust. I don't know if that's relevant.

Questions:

1. Is there some way to carefully extract the data from the drives, and recover the files?
2. Are there any experiments I should try next to gather more information?
3. Is there any hardware I should use to extract the data safely? My laptop has 4 NVME slots. Should I install Windows on a new drive in slot 3?
4. Is there any chance that having those drives in the machine while I install Windows could cause further corruption of the data?
5. Is there any chance that installing the firmware now would help?
6. Should I boot the machine from a Linux USB stick?
7. Out of interest, what might be the mechanism that caused this failure? Would it be some corruption of the data on the FLASH, or has it just got itself into some kind of power state that it needs to be switched out of?

Many thanks in advance for any help or insight you can provide here.

Hugo

raid 0 for anything you want to keep is a bad idea, especially with nvme.

Before worrying about the array you need to confirm each of the drives is working correctly and healthy. If they are you can image them onto stable media and recreate the array in software then extract the data you need.

Get the smart data for the drives , that will give you an indication. How you move forward will depend what your eventual goal is.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

I strongly suggest buying an 8TB hard disk to backup in case the unthinkable happens. 8TB disks have not jumped as much as larger hard disks.

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USB 3.5" enclosures are $19 USD postage paid from China, I own several