RAID Data Recovery

Y

yummydown123

New Member
Hello all and thank you for reading my post.

I have an older computer, from around the time that 64-bit motherboards came out. It was the first (and last) computer I ever built. I used to be a lot more into computers and have gotten less familiar with them over time so please excuse me if some of what i'm asking seems stupid, I know no better.

When I set this computer up I bought two 120gb sata drives and set them up on RAID 0 (I think thats striped raid). From my understanding the data is shared between the 2 hard drives in that raid configuration. (As opposed to mirrored, where the 2nd harddrive acts as a data backup?) Anyway, at some point I ended up having a drive failure on one of the HDD's. My computer turns on for a couple of seconds, I can see my desktop and I have enough time to open my documents folder and see some of my files, then it blue screens.

It's an old computer and I have no interest in using it, but I would like to recover some photos that were stored on those drives.

I have tried borrowing a SATA to USB device from a friend, but it doesn't see anything on the drives. What else can I try? Are their any bios settings I can change that will allow me more time to get to the files I want to recover? What would you guys do?

Thank you in advance and again, I apologize for any part of this question that seems stupid. I really don't know what i'm talking about.
 
beers

beers

Moderator
Staff member
What specific blue screen do you get?

Realistically you could try to find a SATA expansion card with that same RAID chipset on it, but it's likely a crapshoot. Usually RAID0 is a death wish as far as data is concerned.
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
If you can install windows to a different drive, you might be able to pull data from the raid. However, if it blue screens, it might no be a bad drive. May be a malware issue or something else.
 
Y

yummydown123

New Member
johnb35 said:
If you can install windows to a different drive, you might be able to pull data from the raid. However, if it blue screens, it might no be a bad drive. May be a malware issue or something else.
Click to expand...

Attached is the specific Blue Screen. What, if anything, can you make from this?

I can turn on the computer and it will sit at the windows log in screen indefinitely without blue screening and restarting, but as soon as I log in I have about 30-40 seconds before I get the aforementioned blue screen error and my system auto-reboots.

Also, perhaps unrelated, my keyboard works, but my mouse doesn't.

Thank you for your assistance, any advice is incredibly helpful and I am very grateful.
 

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Y

yummydown123

New Member
beers said:
What specific blue screen do you get?

Realistically you could try to find a SATA expansion card with that same RAID chipset on it, but it's likely a crapshoot. Usually RAID0 is a death wish as far as data is concerned.
Click to expand...
I'm afraid i'm too compuignorant to complete the aforementioned task. I appreciate the input though. Thank you.
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Its crashing on the raid driver itself. Try booting to safe mode and see if it happens. You might be able to update the silicon image driver from there.
 
Y

yummydown123

New Member
johnb35 said:
Its crashing on the raid driver itself. Try booting to safe mode and see if it happens. You might be able to update the silicon image driver from there.
Click to expand...
So, it shows in device manager a RAID tab that shows "Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATA Raid Controller"
Under a big yellow question mark it shows a Unknown Raid Controller.

Is the Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATA Raid Controller what I need to find a driver for, and if not, how can I tell what driver I need to download. The computer in question doesn't currently have networking options so I will have to download from another system, but put on a USB drive and install that way.
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
What motherboard do you have? And what operating system are you using? If you right click on the unknown device and click on properties, then click on the details tab, give me the 4 digit vendor and device id numbers. They look like this. ven_xxxx and dev_yyyy where x and y are 4 alphanumeric digits. You might have to change property to hardware ID.

id's.jpg
 
beers

beers

Moderator
Staff member
You could alternatively make a Linux boot CD or similar to pull data off of that array. As it's controller based you should see it show up as a contiguous mounted volume. That'd at least circumvent your BSOD or any Windows specific related issues and allow you to pull data off of the array, assuming one of the drives has not actually failed or is failing.
 
Y

yummydown123

New Member
Thanks for all the replies!

Update: I was able to boot into safe mode, and recover the majority of my files. The only remaining problem is this. Back in the day I created a partition to house all of my photos. When I try to access this partition a message that the drive is not formatted pops up. My guess is that this data is gone. Any thoughts? You all have been very helpful and I appreciate your assistance more than you know. Thank you. Also, beers, I did try booting with an ubuntu linux disk with no success. My guess is it is something I am doing wrong.
 
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