[joden80]

First off I know what I have done is completely stupid, and I know Dell is evil...

My brother in law has a Dell XPS gen2 With 2 raid 0 SATA drives. He kept getting blue screens and memory errors. We found out it was the power supply. He called them and they told him some outrages price for a refurbished POS. I told him we would buy another one from an online retailer.... DIDN'T FIT! He returned. We decided to transplant. MOBO didn't fit! We said fine we'll get a new MOBO and processor. We go along with the transplant, but I forgot to backup the data (moron). I decided to put all the components back in the Dell to back up the drive. I tried to boot and I get press f1 to retry boot, f2 to enter configuration. So I stuck in my handy dandy windows XP installation CD to repair the install. I loaded the raid drivers. After This it finally pops up the partitions. It shows up as unpartitioned space (232 gb).

My XP installation can't be found... After you are done telling me how stupid I was for not backing up my data; It would be great if you all could help... Thanks.

[Advertisements]

No other partitions shown?

[cmpm]

No other partitions shown?

[joden80]

No other partitions. That is the only one

[cmpm]

After installing xp and getting up to service pack 2 you should have the space read correctly.
Without sp2 the drive will not be read correctly.

Is this just one hard drive?

[The Skeptic]

I would try, first of all, to connect the hard disk to another computer and recover the data with a file recovery program. There are some free tools such as Undelete Plus and Pci Filerecovery.

Don't try anything else at this moment. Do not try to fix mbr or restore partitions. The recovery that I suggest is the safest way and should be tried first.

[cmpm]

What The Skeptic said! ^!^
Is what I'd try if I was intent on getting that data back.
The misreading of the size of the partition is minor.

[joden80]

It is a raid 0 with 2 hard drives. Being raid they will show up as 1 hard drive. I am trying the file recovery today. Thanks for the help. I will post updates. Thanks

[The Skeptic]

Have a look at this link. They offer their recovery software for 30 days trial period. It's designed to recover data from raid 0 and raid 5.

[joden80]

Okay so I used diskinternals BootCD and was able to backup my files onto my IPOD, but another problem came up...

Whenever I try to open the images nothing is displayed. I try to open them in the GIMP and i Get this Not a JPEG file: starts with [INSERT RANDOM NUMBERS HERE]

Also, office documents don't open either. Any ideas?

[The Skeptic]

Right click any of the jpeg and office documents, click properties and let us know what is written in "Type of File".
You may also try another recovery program, like the trial one I suggested.

[joden80]

on the jpegs I get this: JPEG Image

on the office docs I get this: Microsoft Word Document

thanks

[cmpm]

From here-

http://www.dougknox.com/

Under Win XP Fixes, there is a 'Restore Default File Associations Easily' registry fix.
I've used it before, but only the BAT file which does all the defaults.
I suggest this if you have these files on your computer.

BUT, let's see what The Skeptic thinks about it first.

[joden80]

Its not a problem with my registry. I can open any other jpeg file. this is just the jpegs that i restored off of the computer.

[cmpm]

hmmmmm.......hope someone can help you
i don't know much
just enough to screw things up...lol...
here's a list from a google search

http://www.google.co...s...5US235&aq=t

but like i said let's see what The Skeptic has.....

[cmpm]

Perhaps the IPOD changed something in the file type-don't know.
I searched for an answer for that but didn't find any similar problem involving an IPOD.

Edited by cmpm, 07 January 2008 - 11:58 AM.