Getting data off RAID drives

T

Tom

Ok,
Here is the story... I have been given the task of getting some
important files off of an old server that started acting up (Would not
boot). The server had 3 SCSI drives A, B, and C. These three drives
were in a hot swap bay and connected to an AMI MegaRAID 1600 Elite RAID
controller. Drive A is a RAID 0 with only 1 stripe (So basicly
standalone). Drives B and C are RAID 0 with two stripes, so the data
is striped across both drives. This gives a total of 2 logical
drives. Currently, with just the raid drives, the machine does not
boot up. I seems that it used to boot to Drive A. So I added another
regular IDE drive and installed XP on it just so I would have something
to boot to. Well XP found the RAID controller and the two logical
drives during installation. But currently XP does not show them in
explorer. I went to Disk Management and found the two other drives in
there but Logical drive 1 (Physical Drive A) was showing as
Unallocated. Logical drive 2 (Physical drives B and C) showed as a
foreign drive. I tried the import but it did not work. I did not want
to allocate the drives as I was afraid that this would erase any data
on them.

Now, one would think that the drives might not be working, or the
controller is broken, but I actually just bought the same controller
from ebay and tried again. Same results. Now here is the neat part.
If I disconnect the drive cage from the RAID controller, and attach it
to the motherboard's SCSI controller port, I can see Logical drive 1
and all the data on it (This being due to the fact that it was never
really RAIDed, and just a single drive), but of course I can not see
logical drive 2's data, and this is what I desperately need. Is there
a way to get at logical drive 2's data? Is there some software or
Linux boot disk that can do some sort of software RAID on the two
drives? Perhaps there is a way to convert the drives to RAID 1 or
remove the RAID to begin with? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Tom Kuhn
 
T

Tom

I am going to try using Ghost to copy the drive to an additional drive.
If that does not work, I will invest in R-Studio and see if that
works.

Tom
 
D

DL

A ggogle search should reveal a number of apps that claim to be able to
recover data from raid drives.
 

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