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I have two hard drives that were setup as RAID-0 and NTFS, one of the hard drives has bad sectors.

does anyone know if I ran Spinrite to move those bad sectors, will I still be able to access the RAID-0?

I am using RAID Reconstructor but it found bad sectors.

If anyone knows a good software or how to handle this, please let me know.

Thanks

miro23
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5 Answers5

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Well, first off, I'm not a big fan of spinrite.. (just my opinion, I know others seem to love it)

Second, go find your backup (you do have backups, right?)

Third, you can look at drive recovery services if you really need the data.

Rex
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  • My friend doesn't have a backup. – miro23 Jan 27 '11 at 18:06
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    +1 If you are lucky they can recover the data from the failing hard disk. Spinrite is only going to wear the hard disk out more. To recover any data from RAID0, you need data from BOTH hard disks for EACH file (bigger than the stripe size, probably 64kB), no exceptions. – DutchUncle Jan 27 '11 at 19:27
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If your data is important, I wouldn't risk Spinrite. With spinrite it will attempt to repair bad sectors by constantly reading them then writing the data back to the drive. It may work it might not. Is it worth getting a DR company to look at it ? Many wont charge for diagnostics so could be worth getting a quote.

Spinrite is more of a maintenance tool that a repair tool.

Mike
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  • if there is no other solution but DR company, then I'll look into that. but I thought someone can suggest a solution before going that way. thanks. – miro23 Jan 27 '11 at 18:08
  • Indeed, spinrite is a maintenance tool for magnetic media such as ZIP disks and floppies. I have never understood why people think it's any good on modern hard disks – DutchUncle Jan 27 '11 at 19:25
  • We used Spinrite when hard drive is fails, it is a good tool if you had a bad sector and you can't boot up your computer, it never failed for me or any other technician used it. but I never used it for RAID-0, probably not suggested – miro23 Jan 27 '11 at 21:58
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get your backups dude and/or hire a company which knows your RAID controller's on disk format well.

pfo
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Stop making the damage worse and get a data recovery specialist involved: if you are lucky they can recover the data from the failing hard disk.

Spinrite is only going to wear the hard disk out more.

To recover any data from RAID0, you need data from BOTH hard disks for EACH file bigger than the stripe size (probably 64kB), no exceptions :-(

DutchUncle
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I would also suggest to take the drives to a DR company, but ... if you still want to try something "at home" - you could try:

  1. using dd or ddrescue utilities on linux to snapshot/image both drives on a third one
  2. then you can try using some programing to reconstruct (combine the two images) the virtual volume (into a third image file) using RAID Reconstructor parameters (for chunk/strip size) of the raid configuration you had if you don't know them
  3. and finally mount the third/big/virtual image file and check what data you could rescue from there.

This whole operation still depends somewhat on what raid implementation you have used and more on how fast is the bad sector's drive crumbling

You can try to read these links for more reference although they are for raid 5 situations: RAID5 Data Recovery and How to recover from a broken RAID5

Angel
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