Raid 0 Died... Need data off drives.

[regigee]

I have just taken a system in and it was using raid 0 striped accross 2 80Gb drives. The main board was a Gigabyte GA 8PE800 Ultra, using 2 IDE Maxtors, thereofre using the ITE GIGARAID configuration. However the main board has died and I need to get the data off the drives. I don't want to send them away to a data recovery firm... nor can I get a replacement board the same as it is now discontinued.

If I put both drives into a different system with XP on the drives aren't seen because the raid has changed the partition.

If I put both drives into a system and run partition magic 8, it sees the first drive as 160Gb and the second as inactive... but will only allow me to delete the partition...

If you try to boot of the first drive in the array from a normal system you get a load error!

Is there any way to get the folders out of this array without getting an identical motherboard?

[directhex]

basically? no, there isn't. not unless you find another board with the same raid controller, and happen to have a facility to rebuild array information from drives (not common on softraid at all)

this highlights two things

1) don't use RAID 0, it's not worth the risks, and

2) don't use onboard software-based RAID, use a real RAID controller such as a 3ware

[nichomach]

I'm not sure that you can anyway, but I would guess that outside of the usual data recovery firms like Vogon, your only other option would be to find a different board that used the same RAID controller, and see if that worked. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

edit: ^what he said ^

[Stephen B]

might be worth giving the board to a electronics whizz to see if repairable, your other options seem severely limited unfortunately

[Agent]

I did something similar.
Once making sure that the new board was using the same chipset, I plugged them in and rebuilt the array. Amazingly, it was as simple as that.
This was many moons ago though, and i cant remember what chipset it was based on. Ill see if i can find out tomrrow.

You may need to downgrade the on chip BIOS, although I was lucky enough for it to work first time.
The chipset is the important part.

[pudds]

http://www.active-undelete.com/
and
http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

offer recovery software for RAID 0.

Ive used runtimes software to recover non-raid drives and its excellent

[regigee]

Thanks all... sadly those are the conclusions that I have come to. I have tried the http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm software also. Sadly it did not see the raid array.

The problem with the board is socket related... it boots occasionally then gives up the ghost. I've treid changing processors to no avail. When I do get in, it doesn't boot into windows, so I think the hive is corrupted... I tried to reinstall XP over the top of itself just so I could get in... but the set up doesn't see the partition correctly and wants to delete it.

I've treid going into the recovery console to change and butcher files but the admin account has a password on it and my customer can't remember what it was. I've tried running ERD commander locksmith on it but ERD doesn't see the raid array.

I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that it is pretty much impossible...

Still open to ideas though...

Do I get points out of 10 for trying?

[wasabi]

You might be able to get Symantec ghost to see it - older versions of it can be had for a few quid on ebay.

[regigee]

Thanks... just tried Ghost 9.0... comes up with general protection fault...

Customer has asked for the data to be destroyed...

Many thanks to all for your advice.