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:

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

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

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

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

Regards,

Rob H

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

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.

What data did you recovered with that?

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.

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