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[turkvu]

I have a Raid 0 setup in my DNS-323 that recently started acting up. I want to create images of both disks as the first step in my recovery - I imaged disk 2 in about a day. Disk 1 appears to have the bad sectors, and trying to create the image has so far taken 3 days and it doesn't seem to have made must progress (currently saying that it has 9 years left).

What are my options for creating an image of this disk? I've read that running chkdsk /r can help temporarily w/ the bad sectors, but I don't know how I would run that against disk in a Raid 0 array (I currently have the drives in my PC to get R-studio working on them).

Any help would be appreciated.

[ivan]

Forget the idea of a disk image, it isn't going to work because of the bad sectors will have destroyed parts of your data.

What you should be doing is copying everything you can from the array onto backup disks, that is assuming you don't have a current backup of your data.

Once you have a backup of all the data that you can get, run the disk manufacturers test tools against both disks.  This should tell you if the bad sectors are going to be a continuing problem - I tend to think that disk is a write off for reliable storage if you are seeing bad sectors because the firmware usually takes care of moving bad sectors to reserve sectors and bringing them on line.

When you know the state of the drives you have the decision to make - replace both or just the one.  Whichever decision you make let the DNS-323 format the drives and then restore the data from your backup.

[JavaLawyer]

Adding to Ivan's post, once your data is restored and you're up-and-running, your first order of business should be creating and maintaining a regularly scheduled data backup.

[turkvu]

Thanks - yes, I already copied almost all the data off the drives. The problem is that right before the disk went bad I accidentally deleted a folder with lots of files in it (guessing that might have helped cause the failure). I was trying to create the image so that I could go after the deleted files with r-studio.

And yes - already setup a new NAS using RAID-5 instead of 0.

[ivan]

The problem is that right before the disk went bad I accidentally deleted a folder with lots of files in it (guessing that might have helped cause the failure).

You are now getting into the region of data recovery from damaged disks - usually expensive.  If your disk setup had been anything other than RAID 0 you would have had a chance of recovering deleted material.

There is maybe one chance of you getting at your deleted data.  That requires a disk with the capacity of your full RAID 0 array (if, for example, your individual disks are 1TB then you would need a 2TB disk).  You then make an image of the ARRAY - not individual disks. 

Once you have the image on a disk, you can use standard Linux tools (using a live Linux CD) to recover what you can.

[JavaLawyer]

I should point out that RAID-5 provides redundancy, but is not itself a backup.
DNS-323 - Data Backup Versus Redundancy