[josiahpugh]

So today my 1TB hard drive died. It started to make some scratching noises so I turned it off. When I turned it back on .... nothing. It's a RAID drive combined from 2 500GB drives. Disk Utility can see the two drives (but not as one) but can't repair them. My concern with trying to recover data with Data Rescue II is how do I make it see the two drives as one? I imagine that whatever data I pull off one will/could be incomplete since it it is split across two drives. My knowledge of how a RAID 0 drive splits the data across the drives is limited.

My poor data! Most of it was backed up but there are several gigs that are not.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[reader50]

With RAID 0 and two drives, the even-numbered blocks are on one physical HD and the odd-numbered blocks are all on the other. Any file over about 4KB will have it's blocks alternately split across both HDs.

Scratching noises suggest a hardware failure in one of the drives. Check the SMART status for each drive in Drive Setup, see if it can tell you which one is dying. And don't put anything on either drive until you ID and pull the bad one.

To have any hope of recovering files, you'll need to get the drives to mount as a RAID volume again. What comes to mind is if the HDs are limping along well enough to still mount, then you could re-declare the RAID volume with Disk Utility. Use all the same parameters as before. It will give warnings about deleting your incomplete data, then will mount a new apparently-empty 1 TB drive. In fact, it will only overwrite the partition table, root directory folder, and bitmap to show the drive as empty. Nearly all the data will still be there.

Do not use the zero-all-blocks option in Disk Utility. If you do, all your data will certainly be lost.

Turn Data Rescue loose on the drive, telling it to scan all blocks. It's going to take forever. But it may find most of your stuff. Try to copy off only the stuff that isn't backed up, since the bad HD could die at any time.

Warning: this is dangerous. You can lose all your data. You might want to wait, see if someone can suggest an option that isn't as risky.

[f1000]

The scratching sounds probably indicate a head crash and any further attempts to spin up the platters will only result in further physical damage to the data. I suggest that he take the drive to a recovery service and have them install the platters into a new drive before attempting any further data recovery.