Hello,

I have two dynamic disks, sda and sdb, on which opensuse, vista, and xp are installed. I incorrectly configured grub while installing opensuse, and it overwrote the MBR on sda. It should have been written to sdc (3rd harddrive). either way, the partition table information on sda is no longer available. it shows up in linux and windows as an unformatted harddrive. however, the partitions on it were part of RAID0 with the other dynamic disk, and I have important data on it.

1st) How can I, from vista, using sdb, find out where each partition starts and ends, because they are the same for sda.
2nd) In linux, how can I feed linux that partition table data to reconstruct the partitions, mount them in raid0 configuration with sdb so that I can backup the data elsewhere?

I am a bit confused. The way I read it, you had two disks set up in RAID 0 (striping). If so, would not the MBR (and any other data) get split across both drives? I think if you have two disks in RAID 0, then each one individually will appear to be unformatted.

This aside, installing GRUB to the MBR should not change the partition table.

Yes, two disks set up in RAID0 (windows dynamic disks). Each disk has its own MBR and partition table.
Installing GRUB should not change partition table, when disks are basic disks. Windows dynamic disks are a different issue. Windows stores dynamic disk partition table info in some wierd way, so that installing GRUB into the MBR of one or both disks prevents linux from recognizing the partition table, and causes problems in recognition from windows. Furthermore, vista and xp both have different dynamic disk formats. While experimenting, vista itself stopped recognizing the partition table too. At this point ony one disk, the one with the modified MBR, appears as unformatted in both linux and windows. The other disk still retains partition info.

Recap:

Disk 1:

1st partition is basic primary ntfs partition with winxp
all other "partitions" are dynamic volumes in RAID0 with Disk2

Disk 2:
1st partition is basic primary ntfs partition with vista
all other "partitions" are dynamic volumes in RAID0 with Disk1

because of this configuration, both drives retain MBRs. If no OS was installed on either disk, the whole drives would have been dynamic, and there would be no MBR or traditional partition table (as i understand it).

opensuse is installed in RAID0 fashion on a reiser fs on the dynamic partitions.

I booted the whole system using grub installed on a 3rd USB external harddrive.

the MBR of disk 1 contained windows bootloader to boot win xp
the MBR of disk 2 contained windows bootloader to boot vista
the MBR of external USB contained GRUB

however, while installing re-installing opensuse, i updated the bootloader installation path so that it installs stage2 into the first partition on the usb drive. however, i forgot to update it to install to the MBR of the external usb drive, so it installed into the MBR of Disk 1. From then on, everything was downhill...

OK--I am now in over my head. I had thought that RAID meant that entire disks were merged by the RAID controller so that they appeared as one disk. I don't know how this relates to Windows dynamic disks. You probably will need to do some research into exactly how Windows configures the partition tables.

Until you have a solid plan, don't do anything which could cause a write to either of the disks. If the data is REALLY valuable, then consider cloning them before trying anything. If your time is also valuable, consider a data recovery service.

Once past the issue of recovering data, I would get rid of all the RAID and dynamic disks---back to basics.

thank you pixellany for useless info.

It's like asking you: Who does this hat belong to?
And you replying: It belongs to its owner.

there is a difference between hardware raid, software raid, and fakeraid, you're the one who needs to do some research.


get rid of all the raid and dynamic disks? how old are you? I have absolutely no need for the raid and dynamic disks. I just feel like making things difficult.

Do you give the same response to everyone who tries to help?

good luck to you.......