My friend has a DELL DIMENSION 9150 computer with 2 harddisk (250 GB each) in RAID 0 (fake raid) with Windows XP installed. There are a lot of documents and pictures installed - and no backup ever done!

I have found some pages regarding recovery data from RAID 0 () but I would appreciate any help/ideas/input!

My friend have bought 2 new harddisks(WESTERN DIGITAL 2500AAJS) which is almost the same as the ones inside.

My plan:

1. copy each harddisk
2. replace original HDDs with my copies
3. try to recover
4. change RAID 0 to normal HDD in BIOS
5. reinstall Windows XP


I have some LINUX distros (DSL, SystemRescCD, UltimateBootCD on Live-CD and UBUNTU installed on one other computer) which I can use.

I read about "dmraid" and then try to mounting the RAID in a UBUNTU live-CD version...

What happens if one HDD is totally toasted? No way to recover anything at all?

RAID 0 is striped... so (1) is not the best idea, fake RAID or not. I put together a RAID 1 Ubuntu system a while ago, wasn't the easiest thing. I needed to use the Ubuntu Alternate CD and went from there.

If one drive got hosed, you're probably out of luck as far as recovery goes. Striping spreads the data between both drives... faster, but if one goes out you're kinda screwed. You can try the recovery with the Alternate CD, but don't expect much if the drive itself is dead. If it's just Windows you have a chance, though.

Is the raid0 set still intact? As headrift says, if 1 hd is gone, your friend has lost it all.

Systemrescucd and many other bootable DVDs and CDs have boot parameters you can add as the CD/DVD boots. You sometimes get help text for these on F2-F4 or so. You normally have to add things like "dodmraid" and/or "domdadm" to make it recognise the raid set.

So provided the raid set is intact, add one of the new drives to the machine. Boot with the correct boot parameters. Copy the files your friend want to keep over to the new none-raid drive. Then you can use the raid bios to change the raid set back to normal drives.

Mons

The package to access a fakeraid in Linux is "dmraid". Given that it's from XP, it will probably be an NTFS filesystem. The device will be in /dev/mapper, and will have a funny name like "/dev/mapper/hehgffbcga1". Mount the one that ends with a number and you should have access. If you use Knoppix, I think it sees it automatically.

It also depends on how the RAID 0 was initiated. If it is fakeraid, then I agree with the above. However, XP can also do software RAID 0 using "Dynamic Disks". Those arrays can be rebuilt (hardware permitting) with mdadm, not dmraid. If you're not sure, you can check with fdisk; Dynamic disks have all partitions marked SFS.