RAID 0 Help

[Captain Spaulding]

I have a customer ASUS laptop, it has a failed motherboard, inside are two identical NVMe drives, side by side configured in RAID 0.

As far as I know the drives are in good shape, what would be the best way to recover the data from the drives?

Can I attached them both to my bench computer in external caddys and use software to mount them in Raid 0 again?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yikes! RAID 0 on a ...workstation/laptop. Without a daily full disk image backup, or...say, some setup where you can quickly rebuild...like using Microsoft 365 with InTune so everything is saved up in the cloud and easily restored (synced) to a different computer

So I know the the "better quality" RAID controllers...keep a RIS file on each member drive. RIS = Raid Instruction Set. This means, you can remove the drives from say...one server, plug them into a different server with the "same family RAID controller"...and that different servers RAID controller will see the RIS files on each member drive...and stitch them together just as they were in the prior server.

With consumer grade...likely "fake RAID" controllers....I'm not thinking that is a feature they have.

There are software packages out there for techs...such as R-Studio, or DiskInternals, and many others I'm sure by now, that allow you to put some drives up on the operating table, read them with the software, and re-produce the RAID volume and recover data. Used to be quite pricey.

If the data is valuable to the customer, I'd call up some "drive recovery services" near you and see what they can do for you, send the drives to them.

 

[thecomputerguy]

https://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

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I'm pretty sure I've recovered a RAID5 back in the day using the runtime raid rebuilder

edit: Ahh you are in the UK ... not sure if that changes anything, but you can still ship to the US.

 

[Markverhyden]

How do you know it's 0 instead of 1? That's about the worst position to be in. Being a laptop it's fake RAID using the Intel chipset. Being RAID 0 means that the tiniest corruption issue could cause everything to be lost. The good news is if there is no corruption issues the data might easily recovered. R-Studio does a good job. https://www.r-studio.com/data-recovery-software/. You can download a full version. If it looks good you can purchase and apply the license key. But if the customer is willing to spend some money I'd go that router. I'm sure @Kitten Kong knows some local to your side of the pond.

 

[thecomputerguy]

How do you know it's 0 instead of 1? That's about the worst position to be in. Being a laptop it's fake RAID using the Intel chipset. Being RAID 0 means that the tiniest corruption issue could cause everything to be lost. The good news is if there is no corruption issues the data might easily recovered. R-Studio does a good job. https://www.r-studio.com/data-recovery-software/. You can download a full version. If it looks good you can purchase and apply the license key. But if the customer is willing to spend some money I'd go that router. I'm sure @Kitten Kong knows some local to your side of the pond.

I'd imagine is you drop a drive into a carrier and you can't see data then it's 0 ... right?

Crazy to ever put 0 in a laptop

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Right, RAID 1 you can still see everything...on a single drive, because RAID 1 is a "mirror"
If you slave a single RAID 0 member (other other striped RAID type)....you won't be able to make it out, you're seeing 1/2 (or less depending on stripe RAID type) of the files..just pieces of them that will not make sense.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Thanks for the replies, it's a University lecturer with important research papers on it, you would think they would know better to back up but ho hum.
It's a gaming laptop so I guess RAID 0 would make sense for a gaming OS install.
I have a very good UK data recovery company I use https://pcimage.co.uk but I might take a couple of images of the drives and have a play around with them first before sending the originals off, r-studio sounds very interesting, thank you.

 

[HCHTech]

I'd imagine is you drop a drive into a carrier and you can't see data then it's 0 ... right?

I wouldn't try this from a Windows computer - Linux only.

 

[Markverhyden]

Thanks for the replies, it's a University lecturer with important research papers on it, you would think they would know better to back up but ho hum.
It's a gaming laptop so I guess RAID 0 would make sense for a gaming OS install.
I have a very good UK data recovery company I use https://pcimage.co.uk but I might take a couple of images of the drives and have a play around with them first before sending the originals off, r-studio sounds very interesting, thank you.

It is possible it came out of the box RAID 1. And @HCHTech tech is correct. You never want to do this on a windows box. Just Linux. Most distro's have mdadm installed by default. But if not it's an easy install. That RAID utility should automatically mount the 2 drives as one. Personally I'd make sure to have 2 image copies of each drive. And make the second by copying the first. Best practice is to do as little as possible with the original. When solid state croaks it's almost always with out notice and catastrophic.