Hard drive issues. Tech help needed.
 

Do you know about striped hard drives? Like what happens if you pull one out and mount it into a new machine? do you lose all the data?

I had a machine die just earlier today. The machine is old but the info on the HD's is all I really want. I'd rather salvage the drives and just toss the machine. I haven't fired it up in months and when I did, the power supply died.

I have an external HD shell, and pulled one of the drives and mounted it into my new machine and it says the HD is striped. I forgot, but I guess all 4 of the internals were striped as 1. Or at the very least 2 of them were.

It's asking if I want to "import the foreign disk" or "convert to basic disk" When I chose convert it said all the data would be lost. When I click "import" it doesn't say I'll lose the info, however, I don't have enough room on any one single drive to hold all the info.

If I choose import... will the data be lost?

What Ever You Do DO NOT Convert

if importing from one HD to another the other receiving the data needs to have enough room on it to hold everything

Paging Rowan. :1orglaugh

If by striped you mean RAID 0 then you need all disks to be present and functioning. You will need to set up the array in the new machine

damn, my only real solution then is to get a new power supply, hook the machine up to a terabyte drive and transfer everything off. :(

Anyone know of a 24 hour computer supply store in LA? I have several power supplies, but none strong enough to power this machine.

ya....right.....

Call Chris...

Definitely go with the new power supply in the same computer. Trying to rebuild the RAID in a new system even with the same drives is questionable.

I did the RAID 0 setup for a while, but you just screw yourself because there are so many other points of failure in the system. It order to really cover your ass, it costs way to much in hardware. Just do old school data copies to other drives periodically instead.

Err. ok.
Unless you tell me that you needed the spindles for performance (which I doubt, as your comments are pretty outlandish) there is no reason for raid 0. You should be using raid 1 or 1+0 for redundancy.

What other points of failure' are there once you eliminate the decision to use striping instead of mirroring, or a combination of both?


Yea, the investment of $250 on 2 1 TB disks is far too steep. Use raid 1.

you can get a cheap power supply for 30$ or so bucks, then return it if you're that cheap probably

:1orglaugh

RAID0 stripes the data in pieces over two or more drives, so you will definitely need all drives present in order to copy off your data. In addition, RAID is often proprietary to each manufacturer (or even down to model level) so even if you were able to hook them up to another motherboard which has RAID support and enough free ports it may not actually recognise the array.

If you want a quick fix then buy a cheap power supply to copy off your data, then stick it on the back of the shelf for the next occasion you need a spare PSU.

Now, couple more things...

...are you sure it's just the PSU that's dead?...

...What about backups?... (What are they? :D )

BTW, because of the segmented striping over multiple disks, a single drive failure will result in the loss of all data. If the PSU took out a drive, or a drive took out the PSU, then you're probably up shit creek.

maybe you need a brainiac! :winkwink:

So what happened, did you recover the data?

Just went and got a new PS. Got the machine up and running again and pulled off the data I needed.

However, an interesting side note...

I now have a HD shell tht I can plug HD's into. I never ever throw away HD's... EVER. so I have about 25 just sitting behind me in the office so I started going thru them and found several that I could get rid of. Small 250 gig HD's.

I've destroyed them in the past, but with hammers and shit. Well this time I took it apart one screw at a time. Inside the HD are needles, yes we've all seen the inside of an HD, HOWEVER what I didn't know was that the NON-DISC side of the needle configuration sits between two magnets that are so FUCKING strong I could barely pull them apart with a pair of pliers.

INSIDE THE HD ARE MAGNETS THAT A 200lb FAT MAN COULD BARELY PULL APART WITH PLIERS. How is that possible? Don't magnets fuck shit up in a computer?

Raid 0 rocks for performance i have 2 10k rpm drives in raid 0 on my workstation :)