RAID Help
:banghead:
My motherboard has croaked... I think... no power, no nothing.... replaced PSU... nothing... pulled all boards, etc... nothing....
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP - its been flawless for 24 months... but alas...it is tits up...
at any rate..it has an onboard promise raid. i have it set up with 2 80 GB maxtor drives in RAID 0. now that the MB is dead...what happens if i plug this setup into a new MB...RAID gone, data gone, ?.... or should I replace old motherboard with the exact same one.... if I can find one....
here is another laugh.... it is a rambus board....if i go to a new one....do i switch to ddr or just get an ASUS rambus board...
thanks for any input...
doc :smokin:
My motherboard has croaked... I think... no power, no nothing.... replaced PSU... nothing... pulled all boards, etc... nothing....
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP - its been flawless for 24 months... but alas...it is tits up...
at any rate..it has an onboard promise raid. i have it set up with 2 80 GB maxtor drives in RAID 0. now that the MB is dead...what happens if i plug this setup into a new MB...RAID gone, data gone, ?.... or should I replace old motherboard with the exact same one.... if I can find one....
here is another laugh.... it is a rambus board....if i go to a new one....do i switch to ddr or just get an ASUS rambus board...
thanks for any input...
doc :smokin:
0
Comments
In any event the data will still be present on you hard drives, it will just be scattered accross the two, so you should be able to retrieve some of it by plugging each individual disk into another system. But don't quote me on that, I'm not 100% sure.
Nevertheless, sorry to hear you're having trouble with your board. I might take this oppotunity to remind people to always keep an uptodate backup just in case of problems like this.
Let us know how you get on.
Spinner
As far as the raid goes if you get another PROMISE RAID controller based board it will probably work but getting one with the same chipset as yours (Promise used several chipsets) WILL JUST ABOUT GUARANTEE it works. Check ebay for another motherboard. Great source for older used motherboards cheap. If its a differant MB you may have to do a XP repair install to get it running but the raid data will be there.
Also consider maybe getting a cheap promise fasttrack pci raid card you can try in any new MB if you go that way.
And there is NO WAY to plug each raid-0 disk in and get any data back. In raid-1 you could possibly but not in raid-0. You get garbage plugging a raid-0 disk into a regular controller and may well damage the array thus ending any shot at getting data off.
Tex
Tex
I am not saying your wrong I'm saying I would love to see a link as this would be a very hard thing to do without the raid card or raid hardware that created the array. It would have to be written specialy for every raid controller manufacturer and even differant makes from a single manufacturer even. So a module for recovering HPT and Promise SI 3ware, lsi, raidcore, etc and even those vary by model at times... I have a lot of highend disk tools and scsi tools and I have never seen anything like that. I have seen stuff that tries to repair a damaged array? But not recover data from an array when you do not even have the proper raid hardware.
Tex
The complexity is that the stripe and cluster is differant for every partition. Some can be raided and some not but if they were good its feasable they could figure out how to unlock the dynamic disks header data. Thats cool in and of itself as many disk utities don't work with dynamic disks that are not even raided !!!
Still very cool software and niftier then what I have been using to recover data so if you remember what software it was please do post back. That would be another nice tool.
http://www.webmasterfree.com/software/SystemUtilities/DataRecoveryTools/file_scavenger_2.1i.html
Thanks
tex
Thanks for the help...could you possibly give me some more info. though? What is the difference between 4k to 128k and in my bios it says chunk size, not stripe size. Are these the same thing? Thanks again!
Let me know. Glad to help. And yes the stripe is what your bios is calling a chunk btw...
In a nutshell the stripe is the amount written to each drive alternately. So 16k to one drive then the other. You also want to try and match the disk cluster size when you format. So your stripe and cluster is say 16k. The cluster is the smallest amount the os writes. So when you write each alternates each time back and forth to each drive.
Otherwise you write clusters until you fill a stripe and then write it. With other drives or certain types of applications you may want a larger stripe but for general usage with ide drives a 16k/16k stripe/cluster is usually optimal or very close.
Tex
Thanks again
For those with RAID-0 setups, backing up your data reguarly is utterly essential!
Even if you only use the basic Windows Backup utility once a week, it's a damn sight better than losing everything.