Saving My Data Off Of A Raid Array

M

Mutiny

New Member
Okay here is some background, I "was" running windows XP Pro with a striped raid array which has been a great set-up for me for a couple of years now. Last weekend I was compiling a video that I made and let it go over night, in the morning when I checked on the machine it was stuck in a restarting loop. I git to stop restarting but it would not boot to windows. So I boot with my XP disk and tryed repairing but it ran in to a frustrating problem with the repair that windows "could'nt find the nsms folder on the disk" or something like that. So I said screw it I'll do a fresh install without format and run the risk of overwriting the data.

So after the install it worked new OS and my data that I needed was still there with 8GIGs left on my raid array. So like and idiot I did'nt start backing thinks up right away I waited and sure enouph after a bit of playing with files and moving things around I got the blue screen of death. When the OS restarted it went to ScanDisk and found errors in the windows folder and started fixing them but soon after ScanDisk says that there is not enouph disk space to fix the problem, this happens every time. So I tryed another install and the install freezes every time when it go's to verify the disk.

Does this mean the disks finally went bye-bye? I'm at my witts end here I really need that data off the disks. I was thinking I could use an old hard drive hook it up through IDE and install the OS on there then hook up my SATA Raid Array as a slave of sort and pull the data off and on to the old hard drive. Do you guys think this could work and is there anything I should look out for when trying this?

Also when the OS is installed on the old hard drive I can jsut install the raid drivers to the OS and hook up the SATA drived right?

Thanks A Lot!!
 
It sounds more like you goofed up your partition information there. One way to avoid perpetual reinstallation of Windows is to take advantage of the system restore or recovery console methods of repair. At the recovery console or even with an old 98 startup floppy you would first try repair of the master boot record with "FixBoot" and "FixMbr" commands tried at the recovery console or "fdisk /mbr" at the dos prompt when booting from floppy.

After repeated reinstallation attempts without seeing a working copy of Windows up and running on the drive you will probably need to delete the current and create + format a new one with the installer. But with this done you would regain access to the SATA drives when the drivers are in. If you find that the SATA array remains inaccessible an alternative and effective method for data retrieval off of inaccessible or hard to access drives would be the use of a live Linux distro that amounts to a complete OS on a cd like Knoppix Live for dvd also having a cd image. Ubuntu and Gentoo also have Live distros while Knoppix is recommended.
 
One thought if you find you need some help is to get here fast. I haven't quite setup an array yet. But I have formatted and reformatted and reformatted and reinstalled Windows and..... The list goes on! Knoppix Live takes getting used to a rather "different" GUI there. But it can get anywhere on any drive with any OS just about. Dos, 3.1, 9X-ME, 2000, XP, VFat you name it. Hopefully you will get Windows running. BUT?
 
I was just looking into Knoppix Live it's free right? By any chance do you know how large it is? And since its linux whats the word on raid drivers do I load linux drivers while running Knoppix off CD to access my raid drives? Also how hard is it to load drivers in linux?

I've messed around with red hat in the past so I know basic commands but nothing too advanced.
 
You first need a software that can burn iso images to cds or dvds for the larger sized distros. The Knoppix Live I ran across was about 500+mb I thought. But when the drive was wiped recently I lost all Linux isos then. I could have easily given you the exact before.

All Linux distros are free to download. Some sites will ship copies already on disk for the price of the disk itself and shipping. Knoppix is a little larger then Puppy but far better since no installation to the hard drive is needed. You simply boot off of the cd or dvd burned with the iso there. It should readily detect the SATA array without drivers since it freely detects drives. Someone who has had the time working with distros would have a better idea on that however. It's easier with the gui there then Fedora!
 
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