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Dell SATA/Seagate Driver Recovery
I've been a long time Dell user and for the first time the Hard drive has failed, and annoyingly my back-up system stopped a few months ago and I hadn't noticed. So I'm trying to recover the data and eventually the system.
I've got an XPS630 system with two Seagate Barracuda 1TB disks which are stripped in some way which have failed (almost).
From a cold start when you turn it on, it goes through what I assume is the SATA/Raid start up and says it has a Healthy NVIDIA STRIPE 1.81T. It then displays the Starting Windows screen (so must be able to read something from the disks) and then crashes back to the SATA/Raid start-up where it says rather than Healthy it has an Error (and flashes red).
Unfortunately I hadn't built a restore disk for this system. When I create a restore disk from a similar Dell system I've got, it can boot from the disk but can't find the drive.
Any suggestions?
Do I need a SATA driver for the system and then load those drivers when I boot from the restore disk I do have, in order to see if I can get any of the data off of the disks?
If I get a clean hard drive where's the best guide for how to rebuild the system (e.g. where can I get the OS from!)
Any other suggestions for how to get the data from the drivers (e.g. if I can rebuild it with a clean drive will putting the two disks back in the other drive slots allow me to see if there's any data on them - e.g. will the stripping work?)
Many thanks for any help/
Stephen
smillsy123
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November 24th, 2013 09:00
I managed to fix this in the end but it took a long time. What I hadn't put was that this was Windows Vista which I'd upgraded to Windows 7, and I still had the upgrade CD. What I ended up doing was:
- Bought a new Hard Drive
- Removed the old drives, and put the new one in
- Installed Windows 7 on it from the upgrade disc (that required a bit of a trick as it doesn't let you use the upgrade product key for the initial install, but if you don't put any key in then you can get to the end and then reinstall it again effectively upgrading Windows 7 to itself and then the product key does work).
- Put the two old Hard drives back in the second and third slots
- The Nividia software was clever enough to cope with the new drive in the first slot and recognise that drives 2 & 3 were striped and RAID 0
- When booting it wanted to chkdsk the two old drives. This ran for a long time, i.e. 48 hours, it never completed but was still putting messages out after more than 24 hours
- repeated the above a few time (i.e. when it hung, reboot and let it chkdsk) - after 2-3 times it completed a boot
- although I couldn't get to the drives from Windows Explorer, it did recognise that they were there and if I used CMD I could navigate the drives and see the files
- used lots of Xcopy commands to copy all the data I needed from the old drives to the new drives
I ended up losing none of my data.
Stephen
RoHe
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October 6th, 2013 18:00