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failed disk on raid 0

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Hi all,

well I've been made only too aware by this predicament that RAID 0 is a bad IDEA.

Basically when I joined my current IT department, I was informed that all our RAID was set to RAID 6 or 5.

We had 2 disks (bay 2 and 3) in our msa20 fail. This was diagnosed by our HP diagnostics utility. Initially, one drive (bay 3) turned orange. I was always under the impression that this was a raid 5 or 6 as all our other setups.

I then removed and re-inserted the disk in bay 3 and it seemed to accept it and all lights showed green. Upon advice from HP, I ran the diagnostics and at this point found the raid to be RAID 0 and that there were actually 2 dives faulty (bay 2 and 3). I was told to power down the storage and disks and to replace the disks if I had new ones. I did this and had to enable the logical drives in the ACU. This enabled with no warnings. I then had to re-activate the disks in the computer management screen and they came back unallocated.

As I was unable to get back the E drive which was the spanned drive of the 3 logical drives, the only option given was to create new volume. at this point, in my ultimate wisdom, I followed this through without formatting the drives. (BAD IDEA)

Now, the question I have is,whether there is a way to put this back to raid 6 without loosing the data? And is there a way to undo the create volume given that I did not format the drive?

I have used a tool "GETDATABACK" to determine that there is still currently data on the disks which can quite possibly be recovered.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

by the way, we use server 2003 standard.

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by robo_dev

The first thing I would do would be to make a ghost image of each disk, using a tool like Ghostzilla. That way if things get worse, you can get back to where you started from.

Next I would pay whatever these blokes are asking for the follwoing utility:
http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/

If the raid recovery tool listed above does not save the day, then you may need to contact some sort of data recovery service, depending on the nature/value of the data.

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