Hard drive data recovery
Turbo Mini Forums

im having a few probs can any one help?

my main harddrive in my gaming rig is set up to be mirrored to a second identical drive in case of drive failure, as it happens its the back up drive that went down, as it always is with computers it never works as it should, it should be as simple as install a new drive, rebuild the raid (an option i get just after the bios login)
but it doesnt rebuild it

soo... im now trying to get the info off this main drive onto the new one using an assortment of adapters and converters and a couple of external usb enclosures and ive hit a snag, using my lappy as the work horse i have discovered the original boot drive (the working one) only has full unallocated space in it witch cannot be opened / access untill its formatted but this would delete all the info on it

does anyone have any ideas, its almost 2 years worth of work, and 80gigs worth of info i could never replace, all my other stuff is good, i had 4 hdds in total

cheers Brett

Yes i moved to the darkside

Instagram @jdm_brett

You were running raid 1 and not 0?

I also use RAID and the only obvious question, if it won't rebuild on a new drive from the BIOS, is have you got a compatible drive for your replacement, and is it jumpered right (if it's IDE).

The time I failed to get it to rebuild was because the replacement drive was too large for the RAID BIOS.

One other thought - is it actually the drive that has failed or is it the RAID controller (which might also explain its unwillingness to rebuild). Try plugging the "failed" drive into a spare PC and see what the spare PC's BIOS tells you about it.

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

it was 2 80 gig sata drives that was mirrored i think its raid 1?
its definitely the drive not the controller i can still use that through the bios, although im not rulling it out,

the other 2 drives was just storage and are still good

when the failed drive goes into the external caddy it doesnt even spin up

i have mannage to get my hand on some software called "find and mount" aparently it can copy info off of a hardrive that has been formatted as long as no new info was written on, i thought the ability to to that was a myth but im going to try :) wish me luck :)

Edited by Brett on 29th Oct, 2008.

Yes i moved to the darkside

Instagram @jdm_brett

Good luck !!!!

I hate SATA, I've never been able to recover stuff off failed SATAs but have had reasonable success with (old skool) IDE.

I'd still question why it won't rebuild if you plug a new compatible disk in for the mirror, unless there is something up with the controller or the primary disk as well.

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

ahh well i dunno, lol the sata raid was my first go at sata, all my other drives was ide, like you say i dislike it because untill now i have had noway to get info off other than copying via windows (i often take one of my ide drives up to my bro's lol) but i cannot fault it for its speed, about 3Gb/s rated usualty 2.5Gb tops as opposed to an ide drives speed of 150mb/s

i have managed to save the info off it, ill post a link to the software i used its free ware aswell witch makes it better :) turns out its a problem in the mbr? main boot registry a good few hours of file transfers and ill have it cracked :) ill be booting from an ide from now-on :) thanks for the help

Yes i moved to the darkside

Instagram @jdm_brett

the software is called "find and mount", and a limited free version is at here limited at 0.5Mb/s lmao only 82Gb to go

Yes i moved to the darkside

Instagram @jdm_brett