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Importing data from a pair of hard drives in a RAID 0 array. Can it be done?
I'm hoping someone can help me here but to be honest I fear the worst :(
I had an XPS 730 for about six months and finally got it all configured and installed to use as a development studio and started working - unfortunately the machine died completely a few days later (insert whole saga of terrible support in here). The long and the short of it is that here about eight weeks later I have a new XPS 730X and was told that I could unplug the drives from the 730 and put them into the 730X which would be able to read the data. Anyway, I did that last night and the new machine recognises them as hard drives but seems unaware that they were part of a raid array and is only helpfully offering to initialise them into a new array (presumably wiping them). I'd really like to get the data off these drives if possible?
Before you start pointing the finger I *did* order an external backup drive but it was out of stock for a while and arrived two days after the machine had died! In all honesty I hadn't expected the machine to die quite so early in its life after spending so much money on it but I'll consider this a lesson learned :(
Does anyone know of anything worth trying? I'm fearful of involving the telephone Dell support in this as I've only had terrible experiences with them in the past so I'm hoping someone here might have another idea.
husky0894
1.6K Posts
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February 27th, 2009 05:00
Once you removed the drives and booted them in a system without the proper configuration, you likely lost almost all chance of recovery. Reconstructing RAID 0 is difficult even for a data recovery service, and would require identical hardware to what you had - so you can bet it'd be expensive.
Consider the data gone unless you have $5,000 or so to spend on data recovery.
MikeFurmedge
9 Posts
0
February 27th, 2009 13:00
Hmmm...identical hardware I may be able to arrange. They haven't been used as a bootable drive and I've aborted all options to rebuild a new array so I'm gonna cross my fingers and hope that an identical set of hardware will recognise them.
The data isn't worth $5k but it is worth a little more effort.
Thanks for the inspiration :)
MikeFurmedge
9 Posts
0
March 2nd, 2009 00:00
Well it took a fair old drive but I found someone with the same RAID controller as I had in the 730 and it recognised my drives without any problem - all data successfully retrieved - brilliant :)