i'm consolidating my 6 individual externals to 3 dual-drive enclosures...one of the enclosures was set to RAID 0 instead of JBOD (my preference) and, of course, didn't initialize the disks when i plugged it in

i didn't initialize, format, or write any data to them, but when i unplugged it and set it to JBOD, it didn't come up at all...put them in individual enclosures and they came up as nothing...initializing them just gives me a drive without a partition

so, i have very little experience with RAID...i'm thinking they were essentially formatted and i'll have to run recovery software on them to get the data back...it's not a huge deal since they're my archive disks and i can barely remember what's even on them...but if i can get it back, that's great...if i can get it back more easily than a time-intensive data recovery, even better

7/26/2011 11:58:26 AM

I'm guessing your formatted the single drives already?

Because recovering a RAID0 array with just single drive hookups is going to be a BEAR. And if it's some proprietary solution straight out of China you might be hosed.

7/26/2011 5:36:59 PM

Eventually I plan to migrate my Windows Home Server V1 to an OpenSolaris or OpenIndiana ZFS with redundancy.

http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/ZFSADMIN/gcfof.html

7/26/2011 6:07:10 PM

^^ i didn't actively format anything...there were two NTFS drives with data on them (data i wanted to keep) and i put them in the enclosure...the first two enclosures were preset to JBOD and so i didn't even think to check the third (which was set to RAID 0)

when i turned it on, windows recognized the device, but nothing showed up in explorer...i assume that going into the disk manager would have initialized the disks, but i realized the problem, turned it off, and set the switches to JBOD

turning it back on, it the disks still weren't initialized, so i popped them out and hooked them back up using their own enclosures...still not initialized and when i DID initialize them with MBR, they were unformatted space

SO...i've currently got them hooked up and using EASEUS data recovery wizard pro (what we have available at work) and it seems to be finding everything (but also 6 MBRs so that should be fun )...but at 36 hours to recover, i'm all like

7/26/2011 7:25:32 PM

^yep you're doing the right thing. When you wipe the MBR, you just need a sector/table recovery software package. Just takes a lot of processing time, but you should get everything back.

7/26/2011 11:10:58 PM