RAID recovery help.

xBrady · 09-03-2007, 02:05 PM

Hopefully someone can help me out. I have two hard drives set up in a hardware controlled RAID 0. My motherboard recently died and so I decided that I would just upgrade my system get all new hardware (MB, CPU, RAM). I have an IDE backup drive that I installed Windows XP on. I set up my SATA drives as a RAID 0 again and booted into Windows. In Window the RAIDed drives show up as unallocated space which I expected. I downloaded every piece of data recovery software out there. With most of them I can see the complete data structure that was on my RAIDed drives perfectly. The problem is that when I have the data recovery software copy the data over to my backup drive the files are always corrupted. For example if I open up a text file that I recovered and open it, it is all garbled. If I try to extract a .rared file it will give me a bunch of errors and only extract the data structure.

Does anyone know why the data recovery software can read the data structure just fine but can't copy over my files? I feel like I've tried just about everything. Does anyone have any suggestions on things I can try?

walstib · 09-03-2007, 03:48 PM

Are you sure the SATA drives are in the same order as before?

xBrady · 09-03-2007, 09:48 PM

Nope, I'm not sure. Actually I just tried switching their order and something did change. One of the programs I'm using called file scavenger now has all of the directory structure. Before it only had most of the directories. Not sure how it works compared to the others but it scans in a few seconds compared to hours. I tried copying over some files though and they are still corrupt.

xBrady · 09-03-2007, 09:52 PM

Another interesting thing is that when I go look at the drive in Computer Management in Windows it pops up with the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard which I'm pretty sure it wasn't doing before.

Enforcer · 09-03-2007, 10:05 PM

Normally windows would say it is a foreign disk and then ask if you want to (not sure of exact term) initialise or something. You should then be able to read it.

xBrady · 09-03-2007, 10:13 PM

I initialized it but all that did was remove the red exclamation mark on it. It still shows that it is unallocated and the only thing I can do with it is partition it. I'm pretty sure that if I partition it then I won't be able to get my data back as easily. Not sure though.

Enforcer · 09-03-2007, 11:20 PM

If you partition then you will be in deep brown yeucchy stuff.

there should be a way of 'importing' it

xBrady · 09-04-2007, 12:13 PM

I figured it out. I used File Scavenger 3.0. I split my drives in BIOS then in File Scavenger I created a virtual RAID. The problem I was having was the drive order and the stripe size I was using. I tried a bunch of different combinations until I finally found out the correct stripe size. I'm restoring my data right now