Crashed Raid0 Drives

[roundakela]

Lost an XP machine lst week when the boot sector became unreadable (damaged sector that can't be repaired according to Seatools and Dells own software). Whipped the two drives out and started again with a new drive and not RAID !!!

Anyone tell me if I can still read the drives to recover data? Treated myself to a SATA dock whcih seems to power up and turn the drives on. Disk Manager sees the drive as uninitiated (Drive 1 and Drive 2) but I can't read them. Take it this is because they don't have a drive letter associated to them. I'm scared to initiate them just in case it wipes out everything on there!

Anyone got any advice or suggestions?

Drives were backed up but I suspect there is some pupil/teacher files that were stored in areas not covered by the backup software.

Regards

Steven

[Michael]

Unfortunately RAID0 data is divided between both drives, so if it fails, you need to restore from a backup. You can't read a single drive from a RAID0 array.

If you're looking for redundancy, RAID1 is a better choice or RAID5 with three physical drives.

[localzuk]

There are a few tools out there to try and recover some of the data, such as this one - RAID Reconstructor - Recover Data from a Broken RAID Array

However, as a general rule, RAID 0 should be thought of in the same vein as satan's spawn - its evil and should be avoided at all costs. It doubles your chance of data loss.