Data recovery from spanned volumes

[Eklipze3k]

One of my HDD's has failed, it was a part of a 3 disc spanned volume.



The other 2 discs are working fine. Now I don't know how spanned volumes work, but I'm hoping it's not like a striped volume and complete files will be stored on one of the 3 discs, rather than split across the 3. If this is the case, how would I go about recovering whatever data remains on the other 2 discs? I've had a google search which suggests Ubuntu may help but would like a Win7 based solution if possible.

Cheers nerds!

 

[colin79666]

Not fault tolerant, you would need RAID 5 for a 3 drive setup if you wanted to be able to recover from any single drive failure while maximising the most amount of space possible.

With a spanned volume when one drive fails the whole volume dies. You best bet is restore from backup, you have that right!?

You could try and breath some life back into the drive. If the bios still sees it then you could try SpinRite. Not cheap but it works wonders on bad sectors.

 

[clock34]

Unsure about recovery but spanned defo starts on one and moves along. So should be possible. Obviously the allocation table us on the first so if that's gone then every sector needs to be scanned by a recovery software

 

[Eklipze3k]

No backup, was only media so no massive issue if it's all gone just means re-downloading which isn't a huge headache. BIOS isn't seeing it so that option is out :/ clock34 no idea if it's the 1st in the series, it's been a while since I set it up, but the way you describe it is how I thought it was so it'd be good if there is some way to recover even a portion of the data.

 

[ChrisUK]

I've got some good utils if you want to try them.

 

[jrkitching]

HandyRecovery might be able to do what you are looking for. If you can mount the remaining drives in some way (I have an independently powered USB > SATA interface which works well for this sort of thing) and can see the disk in Disk Manager, then you will likely be good to go.

 

[clock34]

There is a spanning type that is faster by splotting the info between the disks therefore transferring it quicker. Hense the name spanning. Think you may have this and the other is stripped I'm unsure how it works. I run spanned but not a clue how they fill