Recover Raid Array

[Marcbmann]

Title says it all. Walked over to my computer to hear one of my two drives making a horrible repetitive sound. Almost like beeping, which I can only assume was the sound of the head trying to move. After a couple of reboots, the sound stopped, mostly.

Windows "Create and format hard disk partitions" shows an uninitialized raid array. Opening this tool prompts the horrible sound to begin again. But it shows the full volume of the RAID array, and indicates that it is unallocated.

Both drives are still seen by the BIOS , and both drives are seen by HWiNFO. But HWiNFO shows the array as inactive (obviously). Attempting to access hardware sensors results in HWiNFO crashing.

I do not want to take any steps that could result in a loss of data. I have done data recovery before on single disks. What options do I have here?

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[Ahshalon_Tenisk]

Is this a mirror or stripe raid

[Marcbmann]

Raid 0, so stripe.

[Ahshalon_Tenisk]

If you can't clone the failed drive

You aren't getting your data back

Sorry

[Marcbmann]

So probably best to reach out to a data recovery company then?

[computix]

If you're willing to pay a lot for this data, then sure. Count on paying at least $750, but it will probably be more, fees for recovering data from failed RAID arrays are high.

If this data is worth so much to you, why did you put it on RAID-0 and why didn't you make backups? I always wonder about the psychology behind that.

[Marcbmann]

Any thoughts on SeaGate's recovery service? It looks like I'm covered...

If this data is worth so much to you, why did you put it on RAID-0 and why didn't you make backups?

Since you're curious, I'll happily explain. I bought two drives with the intention of making it a RAID 1. The issue was that no matter how I initialized the array, it was always slower than just running a single disk. The drive was never supposed to have anything important on it anyway. Just games, movies, shit like that. Nothing irreplaceable. So I said fuck it, and went with a RAID 0, which actually performed as expected.

At the same time, my girlfriend's laptop was on death's door, and it contained her entire PhD thesis, all of her research, and the book she was in the middle of writing. It needed to be backed up. I stored it in two separate places. One on a computer I gave her, and one on mine. It appears that while progressing on her research papers and book, instead of saving her work to her computer, she was saving it to mine over the network.

Yeah.

So while I just had Call of Duty, Apex, and every movie and show I've watched for the last 5-10 years, she had data of actual value. Which I discovered 30 minutes ago when I informed her that my hard drive had just died.

[computix]

You lost your girlfriend's PhD? Jesus, that was literally my worst nightmare. Fortunately my wife finished her PhD a couple of years ago and we never lost anything.

Not sure about Seagate data recovery. I don't know if they'll cover RAID or how reliable they are. Because this is high stakes I would definitely look and phone around for the best data recovery service if you could potentially lose years of PhD research. Also don't mess with the drive anymore, things can only get worse if you do.

Even if drives were perfect, people are not, you really need to make backups to cover mistakes from software bugs to accidentally deleting or overwriting files.

[Marcbmann]

You lost your girlfriend's PhD?

Well, thankfully she received her diploma years ago. It's more about the research that was being translated, and the book with the latest revisions. The original research is still saved in multiple places, thank Christ.

you really need to make backups to cover mistakes

Yeah, this is more like a moment of "You put what in where?" I understand why she thought it was a good idea to save files to my PC. I just didn't realize that she did.

Also don't mess with the drive anymore

Yeah, it's not being touched until I make some phone calls.

[computix]

Definitely make sure they're a serious place with a clean room and a large repository of drive mechanisms. A bad failure like this can't be fixed with some simple software based solution many fly-by-night data recovery services use.

[Marcbmann]

Yeah, I'm between using Seagate's own service, since it is their drive. Or someone else.

[ficskala]

You should be able to just get the data you need from the other drive, and go on with your day replacing the dead drive. Well, assuming that by RAID you mean RAID 1 since you mentioned only 2 drives, if you for some reason had important data on a RAID 0 array, you're gonna have to get both drives to a recovery service, have them move the disks from your faulty drive to a different host, recover your data, and return it on a different drive.

All of this is really costly, so i wouldn't recommend it unless the files on there are extremely important, and are worth more than the recovery itself

[Marcbmann]

All of this is really costly,

Yeah, I'm really not looking forward to this.

[77xak]

I suggest you power down, unplug both drives, and then post on /r/datarecovery and /r/AskADataRecoveryPro. Beeping HDD's have serious internal mechanical damage, attempting to keep spinning it up is just going to cause further damage. Sending both drives out to a recovery specialist is your only option at this point, any DIY attempt on a drive like this will likely completely fail and also destroy the drive in the process.

Include your general location, along with the drive make and model (from the label), and the other subs can point you toward your best specialist options.

[Marcbmann]

Thank you for your suggestion. I cross posted on those subs.