Data retrieval from Raid HDD's

jogi730

jogi730

jogi730

Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2008
Posts
14
Hi all,
My motherboard just died (Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus) and this has been replaced by an Abit IP35 Pro (new system essentially).
I hope to replace the old m/b to run computer as a back-up/spare/ and allow brother limited access, but before I do that I need to retrieve the data from the HDD's. THey are 4 x Hitachi 250gb set up as a mirrored and stripped raid.
How do I go about doing this? I tried plugging the HDD's to my new system and the raid was not recognised.
Many thanks
Chris

PS. This is related to post in motherboard section
 
Unless you can find another board with an identical RAID controller to your old one then recovery software is your best option
 
Well, not good with computers which is why I'm hoping for help on here.
I guess sometimes you need to learn the hard way.
By the way, thanks for all your replies.
Chris
 
Just before Xmas I lost my 4x500GB RAID5 array by daring to update the BIOS in my 680i, but by using some clever software tools got everything back. Am I allowed to talk about specific software products on this forum?
 
Sorry for the delay:
As I read this, you had a RAID 10 setup:
RAID 0
.----------------------.
| |
RAID 1 RAID 1
.-----------. .------------.
| | | |
250GB(W) 250GB(X) 250GB(Y) 250GB(Z)
A1 A1 A2 A2
A3 A3 A4 A4 etc.

It's the striped bit that makes things tricky. First simplify things first by taking one drive from each stripe (e.g. drives labelled X and Z above) so you effectively have only a simple two-drive striped array.
As the drives are striped, simple recovery software like Active Undelete will be pretty much useless. On my RAID5 array, though, I found a few bits of software particularly effective, and so should be even better with striped arrays:
Active@ File Recovery 7.1 recovered some data for me. Simple to use. Looked kinda like Active Undelete but with RAID support tacked on.
Active@ Partition Recovery struck me as being much the same program so I didn't play with it too much.
In the end I believe I used RAID Reconstructor to build a VIM file of the layout of my busted array, and then fed that to GetDataback for NTFS to recover files. Anything that GetDataBack couldn't recover, FileScavenger 3.1seemed to have no trouble with albeint took much longer.

jogi730 said:
Hi all,
My motherboard just died (Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus) and this has been replaced by an Abit IP35 Pro (new system essentially).
I hope to replace the old m/b to run computer as a back-up/spare/ and allow brother limited access, but before I do that I need to retrieve the data from the HDD's. THey are 4 x Hitachi 250gb set up as a mirrored and stripped raid.
How do I go about doing this? I tried plugging the HDD's to my new system and the raid was not recognised.
Many thanks
Chris

PS. This is related to post in motherboard section
Click to expand...
 
Oh, and iRecover didn't get anything back for me.
If you want a recommendation, I'd try Active File or Active Partition Recovery first, as Active Undelete is pretty good fir simple drives, so I'd assume these would be OK for striped arrays.
 
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