Recover Raid 0

[Gasp0de]

Hi Folks,
i registered in this forum to get some help recovering data for a friend of mine. I'm new to this forum, so please correct me if i dont do something correctly or if i'm at the wrong place. Please do point out if you know a better place to ask questions like this.
The situation i'm in is the following:
A friend of mine, who is a photographer, and not a computer professional, bought a 1.5 TB backup drive several years ago. It was an external hard drive, Lacie Big Disk Extreme. Some weeks ago, the device failed, and he couldn't access his data anymore, of which he unfortunately doesn't have a backup. So he gave the disks and the device to me, and asked if i could try to recover the data. Apparently, the power supply of the Lacie device failed (seems to be a common issue according to google), so i powered the drives with my internal pc power supply, but left the sata cables of the hard drives attached to the device. So i booted up Kali Linux in forensics mode, and listed the connected devices with lsblk, but the device showed up as 1.5 TB hard drive without any partitions on it.
Further use of google showed, that the drives were organized as raid0 internally (who knows why, they are connected via usb, this should be the bottleneck at all times concerning speed?). I then put the disks into my pc completely, and ran lsblk again. I can see both hard drives now, but only one of them seems to have partitions on it. I started making images of the both hard drives using ddrescue, so i can try to rebuild the raid-array without risking to damage the existing data further. Has anzone ever recreated such an array and maybe has any tips for me? Has anyone ever recovered data from hard drives in an external enclosure that had been organized as a raid0 internally?

Cheers,
Gasp0de

 

[kjv1611]

The RAID0 setup in many external (USB, eSata) drives is just so the manufacturer can advertise a bigger total storage (3TB instead of 2 X 1.5 TB as it sounds in this case).

My guess is you need power to go through the same board, not just the hard drives, b/c you need to power on the BIOS chip/settings on the USB controller/RAID board/card. If you can find a way to get power to that, you may be able to see and recover the data.

Then, make a suggestion to never use RAID 0 in a backup scenario, at least. RAID 1 would make far better for a backup drive/solution. For instance, I picked out a USB drive for a small business a while back as another backup (I guess 4 or 5 years ago, now).. and I made sure it was in RAID 1, not RAID 0 before I ever sent it to them. It's usually an option you can change with a switch or else with software of some sort. I want to say the one we got used a switch.

Otherwise, recovering data will likely not be easy. I guess you may can try Active Partition Restore or DataRescue I believe it's called. There are several out there. But I'd suggest trying to get power to the USB box first... so for instance, looking on ebay for a new power adapter / power supply if that's possible. Next best thing may be to get one that has the power supply / circuit board intact, and see if you can swap the drives out (at least it'd be the same chip involved, possibly), or else if it's connected via connectors rather than soldered, you may can try swapping the power supplies. Anyway, those are some thoughts I'd want to consider if it were me.


"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 15:57