Aspire S7-392-6425: Raid0 Failed - can I recover my data?

SolracOdl

I found an old USB drive of mine and put it in my laptop to see what was on it.  There was some old stuff I thought I had lost, so I was pretty excited.  I dragged the folder onto my desktop, removed the drive, and forgot about it for a week.  Then, yesterday I tried to open one of the files (an image) from my desktop.  File explorer froze and crashed, and then I blue screened: "critical process died."  I now see this when I start the computer: https://i.imgur.com/nASvy8O.jpg

Am I done for?  I know, I'm such an ***** for not backing up my data (well, most of it was backed up, but not some very important recent stuff), and I'll just be devastated if I can't recover any of this.

SolracOdl

Any help or ideas would be appreciated....  super devastated about this.  Irreplaceable childhood family movies, hundreds of hours of original music I've written/recorded, so many memories... Again, I know I'm an ***** for not backing up my data more thoroughly, but I just hope there's something I can try to get some of this back.  Thank you.

Leostat

Im afraid not It places one bit of data on each drive in sequence, so there is "nothing" like a normal file on either disk

Now at risk of rasing a false hope, as this likley would fail.

if you manage to image the drives you MAY be able to get stuff off it by imaging the drives and attempting to rebuild it by using virtual disks, the chances of this working though are very very slim. If you do image them, make sure its connected by a write blocker.

it depends on how the disk has failed. If its kaput, so is the data. If its in the death throws, you may have a small small window to recover data.

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the much safter option would be a specilised data recovery firm. They would try a platter transplant most probs

SolracOdl

Thanks for the help.  Unfortunately I'm not able to send it to a data recovery firm because there are large amounts of very sensitive medical information on it (I'm a psychologist and it has all of my patient notes - which, luckily, were backed up somewhere else, unlike much of the other data).  I know most of these firms say that they respect HIPAA and confidentiality and all that, but my ethical code would likely rule this out as an option for me regardless.

I'm extremely tech illiterate, as you can probably imagine.  Is there a place where I could learn more about the process you're describing?  Thanks again.

Leostat

Give its sensitivity, was it encrypted at rest? If so will be impossible to do anything  

I serioulsy wouldnt recomend doing it if tech illterate as it already has a one in a million chance of working, a data recovery fim would be the way to go. Its not a slight agasint yourself but its fiddely at the best of times. You would need to connect the drives in linux via a write blocker, DD image them and then use something like mdadm to try and read the images

but you would most likley need to massage the images to get them to work which isnt something there can be a guide on as its just a manual process 

SolracOdl

It was foolishly unencrypted, just password protected.

Yeah, I guess I should just throw the ***** thing out....    Anyway, thanks again for your help.

Leostat

Its not foolish its good pratice , but by doing that it stops how you would carve the files out . At this point it would 100% have to be a Data recovery specialist job

Puraw

Maybe buy a cheap USB external HDD case, take the problem HDD out of your laptop and mount it in the external USB case, then plug the case in another computer and copy (recover) and save your data to the other computer HDD (don't copy that file....)?

Leostat

Theres nothing to mount though, the data is stripped across the two drives, apart from small files theres nothing there but random 0s and 1s. Normally you could just plug a drive in but the raid prevents it