Quake3World

The NTFS MFT on my roommates RAID array exploded yesturday so I spent the night trying to get this machine back up without nuking his data. So far I haven't had any luck recovering the MFT and its a RAID0 so there's no help on that end. His C partition is showing up as empty and his D partition has a million unreadable segments so I have a feeling I have to rebuild the array. He said it was doing something and locked up so he turned it off using the power button. I'm assuming that when he did that the drives were spinning full speed and the R/W head crashed into the platter.

Tonight I'm going to try installing XP on a spare IDE drive and running some recovery apps from there. Any other ideas? Do you think his drives are toast or is it possible the MFT was corrupted by software?

Tell him its because he was speaking spanish the other night. Thatll fix him

riddla wrote:RAID 0? lol, might as well format it and write it off before you waste any more time on it.

That's the thing. I tried formatting and that didnt even work. I think the partition table got fucked so if fixmbr and fixboot don't work I'm going to just scrap the array and start fresh.

riddla wrote:why in the WORLD do you use raid0? loading your games 5 secs faster is no excuse for catastrophic data loss.

Cuz we r uber!1

I've been considering leaving them seperate drives if I have to rebuild the partitions/raid/whateva.

bitWISE wrote: I've been considering leaving them seperate drives if I have to rebuild the partitions/raid/whateva.

Good plan but the data that was on them is most likely gone.

riddla wrote:Go with at a minimum raid1 and buy a third identical drive to keep in the closet, at least that way you have an out when the shit hits the fan.

Why would I give him raid1 on a desktop? The only thing we're trying to save here is an mp3 collection

I'm actually planning to get a networked storage enclosure and pop one of my spare drives into it when we move so that the three of us can have a single music/movies location and backup folders.

bitWISE wrote:The NTFS MFT on my roommates RAID array exploded yesturday so I spent the night trying to get this machine back up without nuking his data. So far I haven't had any luck recovering the MFT and its a RAID0 so there's no help on that end. His C partition is showing up as empty and his D partition has a million unreadable segments so I have a feeling I have to rebuild the array. He said it was doing something and locked up so he turned it off using the power button. I'm assuming that when he did that the drives were spinning full speed and the R/W head crashed into the platter.

Tonight I'm going to try installing XP on a spare IDE drive and running some recovery apps from there. Any other ideas? Do you think his drives are toast or is it possible the MFT was corrupted by software?

Did the RAID controller take a shit?

If one of the drives died, you're pretty much screwed. You might be able to recover some info with a recovery program, but not much.

Ok so I think his power supply was starting to die which caused the crash. Now the system is getting zero power...

Replaced the PSU with a 500w Thermaltake and now the system is back up. Still sorting out the drives. It looks like the first disk in the array was heavily corrupted but the second disk appears fine. I'm going to recover what I can tonight and hopefully the partition is just corrupt and not a hardware issue.