[josephabennett]

OK, I really, really goofed, and am a total idiot, but I"m hoping there is some easy way out of this box.

I have an external JBOD box on Firewire (it's a firewire to 4-drive PATA card, with PATA drives on the other side). It had two drives in it, formatted as a concatenated RAID disk set. I added a third drive to it, and was going to add that to my existing concatenated disk set. Installed the drive, so far, so good.

The first two drives I formatted as a concatenated disk through disk utility, and it was simple as can be. I went to add this third disk, and confused myself, and being an idiot (see above), I did the wrong thing.

I selected the RAID set, which showed the two disks, and said they were online. I then hit the "plus" button at the bottom of the disk utility window, thinking this would add a spot for my third disk. Instead, it added a new RAID set. Since this was not what I wanted, (I believe I should have just dragged the 3rd disk into the existing set), I clicked remove to remove this new RAID set. It gave me a warning saying "hey, this is going to delete the RAID set", and I thought to myself "yeah, but there is nothing in this new RAID set... it's empty". So I clicked OK, and holy crud, it deleted the existing concatenated disk, much to my dismay. Again, I'm a total idiot here.

The question is, can I get that RAID set back, with its data? For anything less than a $200 piece of software? Using Unix DD command or something? The data is not irreplaceable (it is 40 digital-8 tape captures), but that would obviously take a lot of time to hook the camera back up, capture them all, etc. etc.). here are more details...

One disk in the set was a 500GB drive, and this is disk3s3
2nd disk in the set was a 500GB drive, and this is disk7s3

There was about 600 GB of data on the concatenated set.

If I go into the command line, and type "diskutil info <disxXs3>" (where X is either 7 or 3), it shows the partition type is "Apple_RAID_OfflineV2", Total Size 465.6 GB, with 0.0 B of free space.

Again, I know I'm an idiot here. Please don't berate me more than I've already berated myself. I haven't done anything additionally stupid like formatting the existing drives or anything. The delete was "quick", so I know the data is still there, and the partition table is probably still there, just marked as inactive or something.

Thanks for your help...

[Big Mac]

That's terrible, Joseph. Don't beat yourself up - too much. Mistakes happen. I don't know if it can help you or not, but the only consumer software around for your problem is Data Rescue II. I don't have any experience with it, but people say it's good software.

[OreoCookie]

I have experience with DataRescue II and it literally is the best software around. It is not a replacement for DiskWarrior as it is a recovery tool which means it only reads data from the defective volume. I haven't tried it with a RAID, though, but it saved my rear-end once when my internal harddrive died.

[josephabennett]

OK, I'm running it now. The good sign so far: in the initial setup, when it lists all the disks, it shows that there at least "was" a concatenated volume (the name of the volume was BigDisk - I know, original). The bad sign so far: the "quick scan" said there were no files there. I'm currently doing a thorough scan, which has about 4 hours to go. Fingers crossed...

[DogGone]

Good luck Joseph. A call to Apple may provide some answers.

One a related note: if one of the disks dies that you have put together as a raid, what happens to your data onthat drive or any of the others? Could you use another raid to act as a mirror?