I had a Fedora 10 Linux system with 3 drives. 2 were set as software RAID, while 1 was set as a separate drive (I back data to it).

I then tried to upgrade my system to CentOS 5.2. When it got to the hard drive partitioning section, it said something like, it didn't recognize the layout or something, and asked me if I wanted to continue. To continue I would have to erase something (I forget what the wording was).

I clicked on no, and it wouldn't let me continue. When I clicked on yes, the next screen I saw only sda and sdb. sdc was missing. Also, sda was "free". The only thing that seemed to offer hope was sdb. The partitions were still there. The only thing is, they were all of the file type "raid".

I tried mounting the drive under Windows 2003, using Ext2 IFS driver. It was able to read one drive, which contained the boot partition I think. However, everything else was unreadable as they are still under "raid" file type.

The other 2 drives just said unformatted.

Is there a way for me to recover the data on this drive? Anyone know of any software that can read drives with "raid" fs on it?

FWIW, what I would try first would be to have the drives connected, then boot with a live CD and see what a proper Linux boot can see (rather than some Windows program that may well not be able to read Linux filesystems). The Mandriva One live CD works well for this I know from experience.

I have a software raid server and did loads of messing around with it to ensure I really understood what it was doing and I am pretty sure that just unplugging one of the raid drives did not stop me from being able to see the data on the drive that was not unplugged.

Good luck.