[clingon]

Home video, photos, my own music, design, documents, letters, emails all gone.... including some of the only photos taken of a member of family and a dear friend who has since past away.

The motherboard failed on my Dell Dimension 9150 meaning that I cant access the dual hard drives, I've since bought another Dell Dimension 9150 mounted the hard drives in it but it doesnt boot up.

A year ago I did back up all my data on to DVD disks, placing them in to storage. They had 99.9 of the valuable data stored on them. Although I placed in a secure metal case, I never knew but the roof has been leaking, damp worked its way in to the box and corroded the surface of the DVDs, only 2 of them now work.

Im devistated.

However, the 2, 250GB hard drives still work I have placed each one in an external case and ran recovery software however all the data is corrupt.

I since tried some other software, but I get the same results.

I've been trying for ages to get something to work.

Then I had a thought..... because info is spread accross both drives do I need to get them working at the same time and if so how would I do that?

I would be very thankful for any help.

Edited by clingon, 16 December 2008 - 05:08 PM.

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I guess I am missing something here, but if all that failed was the motherboard, then the drives should be readable as a slave or USB external. You should be able to see all the data through windows explorer.

[123Runner]

I guess I am missing something here, but if all that failed was the motherboard, then the drives should be readable as a slave or USB external. You should be able to see all the data through windows explorer.

[=OSS*ROID=]

If you had the drives setup in Raid then the only way to read them is in raid. You would have to connect both drives to the motherboard using SATA cables. The drives would have to be connected in the correct order. Meaning that one of the hard drives was connected on SATA Port 0 and one on SATA Port 1. You would have to figure out which port each hard drive belonged to when they were in your old system.

Goodluck

Cheers
ROIDO

[lurky]

Typically those PC's don't come with a raid array for this very reason. You should be able to select a single drive and plug it in as an additional and be able to recover information. Just make sure to leave the primary disk there, and you should have no problems at all.

[98springer]

Clingon,

What do you mean when you say that the data was spread across 2 drives? Were they in a RAID array?

[clingon]

Clingon,

What do you mean when you say that the data was spread across 2 drives? Were they in a RAID array?

First of all thanks for the replys guys!

I'm not sure if they were in a raid array to be honest

All I know is there was 2x250GB hard drive although only one 500gb C drive in 'my computer' which was almost full.

The new PC I bought only had one 250GB hard drive, which I removed. I then placed the hard drives I was trying to recover into its bays and connected up. I then switched the PC on... but got nothing.


I have placed each drive in to an external enclosure, and plugged in to the PC via USB.

Niether of the drives show up in 'My Computer' however if I run the recovery software and search for the drives they appear in the window of the program. I can then proceed to recover files but nearly all of them end up corrupt.

I have tried other software but still similar prob.

Any help would be great, if I can provide further info via pics/ screenshots please let me know.

[lurky]

doh. Definitely raided. You might try loading a physical environment like Knopix or Ubuntu and see if they're visible, but I doubt they are.

[98springer]

Sounds like you might've created a RAID 0 in the computer BIOS or in Windows Disk Manager. The drive space of the 2 x 250s would have been combined to create 1 x 500 but there is no redundancy to save you. If one drive fails you lose all the data on both. I googled "moving raid 0 to new computer windows" and found this:
http://www.tomshardw...aid-array-howto
It sounds like what you may need to do (at your own risk). There were a bazillion results returned for that search so read as many as you can and see what you think. I've heard of people working miracles with Knoppix but I've never used it. I've used Acronis True Image, mentionedi n the link, but not for this situation. It's a great product.
Hope that helps.

Edited by 98springer, 21 December 2008 - 12:47 AM.

[98springer]

And this from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189

[clingon]

doh. Definitely raided. You might try loading a physical environment like Knopix or Ubuntu and see if they're visible, but I doubt they are.

Knoppix is amazing! It hasn't helped fix my problem, but I just used it to bypass a very stubborn 'blue screen of death' to recover files from my friends PC!

I tried to mount and recover files from their harddive but the recovery software didnt see external drive. Ran Knoppix on their PC and backed up files to an external drive. Thanks Lurky!

Also, you got me thinking... standard recovery progs wont be able to recover my data as I obviously had a raid configuration.

I'm going to try RAID Reconstructor http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

It creates images of each drive then trys virtually sticking them back together again.

I'm not sure if this will work, by I've tried everything else

[clingon]

Sounds like you might've created a RAID 0 in the computer BIOS or in Windows Disk Manager. The drive space of the 2 x 250s would have been combined to create 1 x 500 but there is no redundancy to save you. If one drive fails you lose all the data on both. I googled "moving raid 0 to new computer windows" and found this:
http://www.tomshardw...aid-array-howto
It sounds like what you may need to do (at your own risk). There were a bazillion results returned for that search so read as many as you can and see what you think. I've heard of people working miracles with Knoppix but I've never used it. I've used Acronis True Image, mentionedi n the link, but not for this situation. It's a great product.
Hope that helps.

Thanks 98, Ive got yet another PC that I've been using while I work on the one with broken motherboard and the replacement that Ive tried mounting the drives in.

Ive since heavily invested on data storage and back up, so for the moment I have the extra room on a NAS to work with images, so I'll try that first I think then maybe try and hard wire again if it doesnt work.