Windows Recovery with Ubuntu Live
 

Alright, a friend of mine, a Linux guru said I should post my situation here since he couldn't figure it out.

To make a very long story short, i got a virus on my windows drive and im trying to recover the files using a Ubuntu Live CD.

My windows partition is spread across two 500 gig drives, run in RAID 0.

We cant seem to mount either of the drives to try and access the files.

All I want is my files, so that I can officially be done with windows and install Ubuntu or some other form of Linux.

Thanks for any help!
(im a Linux noob, so if you explain something, please explain accordingly)

In short, you can’t.

When you create a striped set (RAID 0), the data may be striped across all drives. Since both drives pretty much act as a single drive, you would have to bring the array back up with both drives. If your RAID setup is provided via hardware to make the array appear to the OS as a single drive, then you may be able to do something. However, if it is software RAID, or hardware RAID that requires special drivers, will are probably out of luck. Although Linux easily supports various RAID implementations, you cannot move or load RAID arrays will-nilly between systems and/or operating systems without serious pre-planning and forethought.

In any case, you cannot mount one or the other drives and expect to get data, it does not work that way with stripped sets---it is important to note that if you had a RAID 1 (mirror set), then you would be in a much better situation. Mounting a single disk from a striped array is kind of analogous to losing a drive to a hardware failure.

When doing striped sets, you must be very aware to the benefits and detriments to having such as system. The performance increase most likely will not offset the increased chance of failure. If you feel you must implement a striped array, use RAID 5 consisting of three or more disks and parity for fault tolerance.

Since you are infected and you want to retrieve your files from the Windows installation, boot into Safe Mode as a lot of malware is rendered less lethal in Safe Mode as opposed to normal mode.

Last, but definitely not least, get a good AV app and keep it up-to-date!

Good luck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks

If Windows are broken, maybe use Windows to repair them?
 

It may be hard to get access to your RAID array in Linux if it requires special driver as /usr/darien explained. But since you did have Windows installed, your RAID was recognized by Windows somehow. Did you try to use Windows install CD and reinstall Windows? If Windows installation finds your partition, you can proceed with installation, only do not let it format your data partition!
You may also try not the Ubuntu LiveCD, but a distro more prepared for data recovery. Try SystemRescueCD..
Good luck.

You may want to be very very careful handling a windows RAID0 from Ubuntu - it can get totally ruined in not time at all.

You may want to consider creating a windows livecd. I know that it can be done but I have never tried it so you'll have to rely on my friend google for the details.

Thanks for the help.

Basically, while I understand the downside to a RAID 0, what I was using it for, was basically storage, and for video games. Ultimately all I lost when my computer died was the time it takes to restore a system back to my settings.

I figured I would try and learn a little about Linux in the process of trying to fix my computer. In the end I just re-formatted the hard drive and re-installed Windows.

Now I am on to my next challenge. In the past I have set up dual boots with ease, however this my first time dabbling with into RAID stripes of any kind. Here is my setup.

HD 1 - 500 GB
HD 2 - 500 GB

Those are tied together with a RAID 0
then I have

HD 3 - 250 GB
HD 4 - 250 GB

and each of those is its own entity.

Windows is on the 1 terabyte RAID 0, and I just finished installing Ubuntu on HD 3, and was planning on installing Fedora on HD 4. The install went just fine, no problems, however now I cant get it to boot back into windows.

Yes both are primary drives
Yes I have played with the boot order in my BIOS

What am I missing, I have never run into this when I used to dual boot two versions of windows.

Thanks for the help guys, eventually I want to play around with linux and learn what I can. I am a computer science student and I have windows and OSX almost down pat, now on to Linux. lol

Okay. How is your RAID 0 setup? Is it hardware based or software based? The difference is dramatic when it comes to restoration.

For example, with a hardware based RAID 0, the system will see both drives as a single entity. When you load Linux on your third drive, HD1 and HD2 will appear as just SDA or HDA (depending on your distribution) and not SDA (HDA) and SDB (HDB).

If your Linux installation sees SDA, SDB, SDC, and SDD, then your RAID 0 setup is probably software based and any information on the Windows side will be unavailable as the array is effectively broken.

Likewise, if you created your Windows partition using disk manager’s dynamic disk option (required for software RAID 0), you will not be able to mount that partition from Linux. The only mountable partition type is primary or extended.

When you say that you can’t boot back into Windows, what are you experiencing? Does the system just hang at a black screen or do you BSOD?

Never say you have an OS down pat. There is entirely too much involved with any modern OS for anyone to claim complete mastery. And after you “finish” with Linux, time to move on to a real Unix flavor such as Solaris or AIX.

Well as I said before I have only begun to dabble with RAID. Currently I setup my RAID though the RAID configuration utility that came with my MOBO. I did not set it up in Windows. So im guessing that its hardware based.

I am not as worried about Ubuntu reading my RAID 0 drive anymore, I managed to get the files I wanted and simply re-installed windows on a freshly reformatted drive(s).

As far as booting into windows goes, when I used to dual boot, the computer would load up, and come to a screen that would give me some boot options.

"Windows XP Professional"
"Windows Vista Ultimate"

"Choose One"


However, right now, the computer just goes straight into Ubuntu without giving me the option to boot into Windows. I am sure that if I just unplugged the hard drive with Ubuntu on it, then I would be able to get back into Windows, but I shouldn't have to do that. I should just get a menu asking which OS I would like to use.

I have played around in my BIOS and changed the boot order of the drives, however no matter what I have done so far, it always boots into Ubuntu.

Thanks again for the feedback guys.

If windows is not on the boot drive, it needs to be mapped in your grub file.

Grub file? How would I go about mapping it?

Your GRUB file is the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
I have a windows on drive 2 so the XP line goes like this:
You may need to edit the hd entries (and the title for Vista - but this is not critical, you can call an OS anything you want really).
hd0 = first drive
hd1 = second drive
etc.
partitions on a drive are counted from 0 so (hd1,0) means 1st partition on 2nd drive.
root is the partition that holds your windows OS.

You can edit the file by running
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
from a terminal.

Btw, you may want to paste my code to your own file to do the editing. GRUB is very picky about syntax. Leaving out a space is enough to make it fail.

If you install a second Linux distro, you could overwrite your current GRUB but it is more convenient to chainload. Just let the second distro install its GRUB to its own boot or root partition (must be ext2 or ext3) and add something like this to the GRUB file of your first distro:
This is for a Fedora system that has its boot partition on the second partition of drive 4.
This will make the first GRUB call the second one. It makes updating kernels a piece of cake (if you use a single GRUB for both, you'll have to edit GRUB each time a kernel is updated - which, in the case of Fedora, is about every two weeks... Chainloading takes care of this for you.