RAID Recovery

[the_cultie]

About 6 months ago I built a pc for a mate of mine with the following spec:

Amd Athlon64 X2 4800+ (Socket 939)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
4GB OCZ Value DDR RAM (4 x 1GB)
XFX 7600GT
Plextor DVD drive - SATA
2 x Western Digital Caviar 200GB (RAID 0 -- 400GB)
OCZ PSU 520Watt (12v - 28Amps)

Now he's having problems where the machine will not boot at all, even the Bios screen will not appear. I'm currently working on that problem but my question is to do with recovering his very important, very expensive data. I was wondering could i plug his hard drives into a PC with the same mobo or based on the same chipset amd RAID controller (the hard drives were pluged into the Nvidia controller).

Thanks in advance.

 

[Xaotic]

First, if at all possible image the drives and work with the imaged drives. This will protect the data on the originals.

The drives would more than likely be recognized on the new planar, preferrably an identical board, though the same chipset, RAID controller and drives plugged in with the same configuration will likely work.

In this case, I'd try a new board and install to a separate disk(large enough to save the data). After OS is installed, then work from the imaged drives to recover data. It may recognize the drives and data, but if not some recovery applications will enable rebuilding a virtual RAID for failed configurations, for example R-Studio from r-tt.com.

The important part is to preserve the condition of the original disks. This will allow for the potential for professional data recovery, if needed.

Finally, important data should NEVER be stored on a RAID-0, other than temporarily as a working set, and should ALWAYS be backed up, perferrably in multiple methods and locations.

 

[Tovarish]

yes "preserve" the drives as much as you can..
Since you are not sure it's problem with drives - you need the same or higher version of that onboard raid controller - i.e. same or newer motherboard.

Also, if there is corruption on your raid volume and/or trouble with drivers check this site out (so many time it saved me):
http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

.. and even if you decide to move to raid 1, there is NO replacement to backups.

 

[Jeepson33s]

agreed, get a good form of solid backup