Dell Dimension 9150 - Raid 0

[flashsnaps]

Hi all,

 

I have a Dell Dimension 9150 which I have come to realise has RAID 0 (striped) across 2x 150gb drives.

 

Other than faster performance I can't see why they have done this on a desktop machine???

 

A drive has failed (great!) I have tried to run a chkdsk on it, but it just won't run.

 

I could do with getting the users data off, but how can I run a recovery program on 2 drives? As it's RAID 0, the data will be striped across the 2 drives.

 

Any pointers would be amazing.

 

Thanks

[tmcd35]

If one of the drives has failed completely then half the data went with it, what is left on the other drive would be meaningless. There may be companies out there you could pay to recover the data, but to be honest thats the price of RAID-0.

 

RAID-0 seems to be popular for improving performance on modern gaming machines from companies such as Alienware, Voodoo and Commodore.

[Butuz]

I guess thiss will be a lesson to you in why RAID-0 should never be used for anything other than making 3d games load faster. If you lose one drive, you lose all your data off both drives.

 

A data recovery company could probably get some or all data back but its gonna cost you alot.

[HDMonkey]

I found a recovery company who has experiance in this area:-

 

Home Data Recovery

 

They mention "DELL Dimension 9150 RAID-0" recovery. Must be a common problem.

[tonyd]

Although not a free solution, I've had some good experiences with SpinRite (GRC|Hard drive data recovery software) being able to fix hard disks that seem otherwise dead. Plug the faulty drive into another PC (not RAIDed), boot up SpinRite, select option 4 to repair, leave it until complete, then re-connect to the array and cross fingers!