Before I get to the actual question(s), a little backstory / background...

Before I left for deployment, I had both my own and my wife's desktops running in tip-top shape (at least that I could tell)

About three months ago, she tells me that mine has been offline (as in, it doesn't power up at all, sits there and squeals a DRAM error post code beep (I looked it up)) since a month or so after I left, and hers is acting squirrelly as well... Hers only boots up and stays running for about an hour, then shuts down and won't boot back up for a good couple hours afterwards.

So when I get back, we look into a laptop for her, and I go to town trying to figure out WTF is going on with the desktops...

In the meantime, I have this neat little HDD enclosure +500GB HDD I bought... I am going to pull the HDD from her desktop, slap (figuratively) it in the enclosure, and transfer all her pictures, documents, etc from her old desktop HDD into her laptop. No worries, it's IDE, so is the enclosure, no problem...

Now MY desktop on the other hand, I have my OS and data partitioned cross a RAID 0 setup on a pair of Raptors. HOW THE HECK DO I GET ALL THAT DATA BACK?

To my knowledge, the Raptors are not corrupted (possible, but I can't get it to boot, remember?). IF I can get the machine to boot, backing up my data to the 500GB external storage drive is academic, even I can figure that one out.

If I CAN'T get it to boot, what am I looking at for opening/saving the data from the RAID stup?

Anyone?

Quote: Originally Posted by GrandpaNoob72 Before I get to the actual question(s), a little backstory / background... Before I left for deployment, I had both my own and my wife's desktops running in tip-top shape (at least that I could tell) About three months ago, she tells me that mine has been offline (as in, it doesn't power up at all, sits there and squeals a DRAM error post code beep (I looked it up)) since a month or so after I left, and hers is acting squirrelly as well... Hers only boots up and stays running for about an hour, then shuts down and won't boot back up for a good couple hours afterwards. So when I get back, we look into a laptop for her, and I go to town trying to figure out WTF is going on with the desktops... In the meantime, I have this neat little HDD enclosure +500GB HDD I bought... I am going to pull the HDD from her desktop, slap (figuratively) it in the enclosure, and transfer all her pictures, documents, etc from her old desktop HDD into her laptop. No worries, it's IDE, so is the enclosure, no problem... Now MY desktop on the other hand, I have my OS and data partitioned cross a RAID 0 setup on a pair of Raptors. HOW THE HECK DO I GET ALL THAT DATA BACK? To my knowledge, the Raptors are not corrupted (possible, but I can't get it to boot, remember?). IF I can get the machine to boot, backing up my data to the 500GB external storage drive is academic, even I can figure that one out. If I CAN'T get it to boot, what am I looking at for opening/saving the data from the RAID stup? Anyone?

RAID 0 is hard to recover anything. Some situations with similar or exactly the same drivers, you can rebuild the array (by chance) and pretty much use them as they were.

RAID 0 isn't for the nessesary docs, use it for your games and OS, but keep important stuff on the side (IDE or sata drive).

Depending on the actual importance of the data, I wopuld start by troubleshooting the PC first, seeing what isn't working, swapping some memory, and unplugging the HDD's CDrom's and other factors, to narrow it down. If its the board, theres a good chance you won't be recoving the data for anything easy and cheap like.

I wish you luck (the same thing happens everytime i leave the area for any amount of time, everybody's PC i help fix goes nuts)

Assuming it's just a memory problem, and the machine boots up with different memory, you should be fine. Once it boots up, Norton Ghost works to copy the array to a backup drive... it's what I use.

A quick update...

I still owe HTRN some +rep for pointing me in the right direction as far as how to get the 500GB HD formatted when I couldn't get it to show up on the list of devices in "My Computer" (where all hard drives are shown once you double-click)...

I pulled the HDD from the wife's desktop, slapped it into the encloure, and then hooked the enclosure up to her new laptop. Transferring all her documents and settings was a snap, done in about 10 minutes (she had a lot of work and Family Readiness Group stuff on it).

Then for the Raptors...

I tried to clear and reset the CMOS on my DFI SLI-DR, but I kept getting a DRAM error post code beep (long beep, long pause, long beep, repeated until I power down)... Last resort, I knew her computer would work, other than the random shutdowns. Cleaned and re-applied the AS5 under her HSF, then plugged the Raptors into the SATA slots, enabled RAID in her BIOS, and viola (intentional misspelling), I have the Raptors visible as a 140GBish local disk. Copy all the pertinent files onto the 500GB (now in the enclosure), and I'm pretty much done...

Should be putting some stuffs up for sale soon, like the DFI board (I don't know if it's totally FUBARd or not, and I really don't have the time to fiddle with it), some DDR (either the 2GB of Patriot or Crucial Ballistix), and two of my Lian Li cases (Infantry Tribute Rig and the PC60 I etched a window for my wife on...)

Bottom line, everything turned out good, and a special thanks to Gumby for keeping me on task... My stubbornness helped, but having someone keep me focused and thinking always helps...

Glad you got your files off the RAID GrandpaNoob! I did not know you could swap a RAID 0 to another computer and get anything off of it. Interesting. I guess it never hurts to try.

E

When I fired it up and went into the BIOS, I had the option to set the RAID stripe as a "secondary hard drive" when I enabled SATA RAID...

I guess I got lucky with the BIOS having that option...