Okay, I tried this on a few other forums but most of the responses were from less educated types than I find here on the Empeg board. This isn't a specifically Empeg question but I know we have a lot of hackers here, so I figured it's worth a shot.

Here's the deal. I run Windows 2000 at home on a RAID-0 stripe. That means two 20 GB drives become a faster 40GB drive through the magic of RAID, but there isn't any inherent redundancy as RAID might suggest. So anyway, my system (Duron 800 on an ABit KT7-RAID motherboard) has run solidly for about a year. Well the other night I rebooted and as my PC was going through BIOS messages I saw the dreaded "RAID Stripe Broken" message from my RAID controller.

Uh oh.

So, the long and the short of it. I rebuilt the RAID stripe information, which, to my knowledge, doesn't clear any actual data off the drive, but also doesn't bring everything back to normal. The logical partitions themselves are inaccessible. I tried to recover using various methods found on a few other forums involving some DOS utilities to "detect" the partition layout. Nothing worked so far.

So now I have a lot of important data on the hard drives, but no way to get said data back. Why didn't I back up? Well, I did. But I did it to a CD-RW disc, and I had to erase that disc to do some test burns when I was on with my CDR tech support people. I did this only a week ago, and was going to backup everything again this weekend. The ONE WEEK I don't have a backup, my PC fails. There's irony in there somewhere.

Well anyway, I'm hoping there is a utility out there somewhere that will allow me to comb through my disks and somehow get some of my files back. The partitions were NTFS, and I have not been able to recreate the partitions as they were. Does something like Partition Magic aid in this? Norton Disk Doctor won't detect the partitions or do anything with them...

I have a feeling I'm SOL here, but I'm willing to resort to strange and unusual methods to get some of this data back.

TIA for any and all help.
-Tony

-Tony
MkII #554