motherboard died, how to move RAID 0 to new pc?
Hey everyone, I was looking around on the net for any kind of forum that might be helpfull with RAID volumes and stumbled upon this -hope it works!
Here is what happened, i had a Chaintech 7VNF4-ultra motherboard with onboard s-ata raid. I had 4x 80Gb seagate hard drives in a stripe array as my boot volume in the system. Last week the motherboard decided its had enough of me and died
I bought a new asus motherboard with intel cpu (asus P5k3 deluxe MB)...
I set the sata controller to raid mode and figured it might be able to imoprt the old volume, but it reports the disks as "non-raid" stauts and wants to wipe them all to create a volume,so I left them intact. Then I installed windows(XP Pro) on a seperate old IDE hard drive and figured I can import the volume in windows disk management. Disk management shows the 4 drives but the 1st one of the set has a drive letter assigned to it and shows a RAW partition, the other 3 are just blank "unallocated" disks.
I tried to convert all 4 to dynaimc volumes but only disks 2-4 woked, when trying on disk1 I get an error: "INTERNAL Error - The specified field is not valid".
So here I am with about 250Gb of stuff that even contains work related information that I REALLY dont want to lose.
Do I have any hope to regain access to them?
Any help or a pointer to someone that might be able to help would be much appreciated.
Here is what happened, i had a Chaintech 7VNF4-ultra motherboard with onboard s-ata raid. I had 4x 80Gb seagate hard drives in a stripe array as my boot volume in the system. Last week the motherboard decided its had enough of me and died
I bought a new asus motherboard with intel cpu (asus P5k3 deluxe MB)...
I set the sata controller to raid mode and figured it might be able to imoprt the old volume, but it reports the disks as "non-raid" stauts and wants to wipe them all to create a volume,so I left them intact. Then I installed windows(XP Pro) on a seperate old IDE hard drive and figured I can import the volume in windows disk management. Disk management shows the 4 drives but the 1st one of the set has a drive letter assigned to it and shows a RAW partition, the other 3 are just blank "unallocated" disks.
I tried to convert all 4 to dynaimc volumes but only disks 2-4 woked, when trying on disk1 I get an error: "INTERNAL Error - The specified field is not valid".
So here I am with about 250Gb of stuff that even contains work related information that I REALLY dont want to lose.
Do I have any hope to regain access to them?
Any help or a pointer to someone that might be able to help would be much appreciated.
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But if you can find a board with an identical controller you might have luck.
Also it seems chantech no longer makes motherboards and the link to that board has nothing listed under specs. I found a review on a another site that lists it as: NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra MCP. Sounds kinda vague to me, I'll look at the manual tomorrow.
So assuming i can find a similar/identical raid controller it should detect the volume again and bob's..my uncle?
Well via's wouldn't see my array and I had an identical motherboard to The previous one (Asus A8v deluxe). I haven't tryed on an nvidia or an intel.I just use software raid under linux now md rocks if the controler fails it will still work flawlessly on another one.
So i borrowed a friends pc, gigabyte mb with nforce4 chipset.
The array was detected, but only the 1st disk - same one my windows shows having a raw filesystem. The other 3 disks are just shown as blanks
Could this be me plugging them in the incorrect order? Is there a way to determine the order? (i did try swopping some of the cables and had no luck, didnt have a lot of time to round robin them all tho)
*update*
I loaded a program called Acive@ file recovery and it can create a virtual RAID from the 4 disks. I shows the entire root filesystem and i can even recover one or 2 test files but the majority is corupted. I suspect thats because the files are read from the wrong disks. So here we are again, is there a way to see maybe in the hard drive 1st few sectors where in the raid volume it was supposed to be?
*final word*
Okay, playing around with the disk order I finallystumbled across the right sequence, everything works, just recovered two 150mb anime eps and they play fine, the whole tree is intact and everything. So if anyone ever has a controller failure, get active file recovery and let it rebuild the array and save what u need!!
It's good to get some feedback on a product like this. What link might you have? While your drive order was probably as key as anything, I've been wondering about the abilities and quality of some of these RAID utilities as I contemplate trying it.
Glad you got your data-