RAID-1 array rebuild went horribly wrong

[isaacgrover]

Good afternoon,

I have a client with a computer utilizing a RAID-1 setup with 2 SATA2 drives. One drive went bad so he purchased an exact replacement and rebuilt the array using the Asus A8V onboard RAID application. The problem is that I think he did a "create" instead of a "create and duplicate" because all of his information on the original drive is no longer there. The old drive simply shows as being an unformatted 160Gb drive.

What possibility is there to recover the data on the original drive?

Thank you in advance,
Isaac Grover


--
Isaac Grover, Owner
Quality Computer Services of River Falls, Wisconsin
Web:

http://www.qcs-rf.com

 

[kjv1611]

Well, for the cheapest route, I'd just hook up the hard drive that had the data to a different computer, download one or two free data recovery programs, and see if you can turn up anything. If that doesn't work, then it may be that the only way to get it off would be through a data recovery company - likely to be very expensive.

That's my guess, anyway..

 

[wolluf]

I've had a very similar situation - getdataback recovered the whole disk (with the odd anomaly - duplications mainly) - managed to recreate the installation with a repair reinstall, after copying the recovered files/folders back to original drive. Had one or two 'funnies' which I had to troubleshoot, but all back and working after a few hours. I'd expect any decent data recovery app to work - not sure you'll get away with a free one.

 

[stduc]

Its an easy mistake to make. I would recommend getdataback I believe it can 'try before you buy' - that is it lets you see what it would recover.

I always use trueimage to backup the remaining good drive before restoring a RAID 1. depending on the RAID driver/hardware it can be quite challenging working out which way you should permit the copy!

I think in this case I would use a third drive. Recover the data to that - Then use Trueimage (say) to clone the recoved data to the customers new drive and see if that will boot in the original machine. If it does - maybe after a bit of repairing - you can re establish the RAID. Once happy all is OK, the extra drive you used is available for some other duty.