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posted: 2 Mar 2011 17:11 from: Ian Allen
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Hi everyone, Don't know if we have any really good IT people on here, but my RAID 0 arrayed PC seems to have lost Windows Vista. Now, a friend of mine has interrogated the drives and it seems there is a problem with the Master Boot Record partition. We have attempted a /FixMbr using the Vista OS disc, but this hasn't resolved the problem. /ScanOs still shows no Windows applications on the drives. Both drives are healthy and have no faults. At the moment my only course of action is to a data recovery company and have had quotes around the £900 + VAT mark, which I currently cannot afford unfortunately. Has anyone any experience with RAID PC's or any ideas of what I could try to fix the problem ? Ian |
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posted: 2 Mar 2011 18:30 from: mike47j click the date to link to this post click member name to view archived images |
Do you actually use raid 0 ? One big fast disk made from two small slower disks, but with double the risk of losing everything. It's more popular to use raid 1 (disk mirroring), or raid 5 to increase reliability. Secondly, how is the raid done, hardware, software, or sata. Did the system come configured as raid with the makers copy of vista ? I take you tried the Vista Recovery on the CD and that failed. If the Vista CD disk does not recognise the drives as in raid, and treates them as 2 separate drives then /FixMbr may have done a bit more damage. Unfortunatly, I think you are in a situation were it's very easy to lose everything. My thought would be to label which disk is which, remove and keep them safe. Create a new system on another hard disk. If the current disks are sata, then a pata disk would be a good choice as it usually boots before the sata ones. Add the raid driver. Then add the saved disks back in (the right way round) and hope that all the files re-appear. Mike Johnson |
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posted: 2 Mar 2011 19:12 from: Ian Allen
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Hi Mike, 1. Yes it is a RAID 0 array. RAID 5 is for 3+ disks 2. SATA. Asus P5N-D motherboard configured as RAID in the BIOS.The PC didn't come with RAID drivers on a floppy disk or CD/DVD. 3. Yes have attempted /FixMbr from the Vista Recovery CD. That is what I was advised to try by MJM Data Recovery. Have attempted booting from another disk with Vista on, but the problem remains that there is no MBR on the 2 SATA RAID discs for them to be read. Regards Ian |
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posted: 2 Mar 2011 21:15 from: mike47j click the date to link to this post click member name to view archived images |
It seems that just having the settings in the bios is not enough. You need the raid drivers as well. If the PC came with a PC specific Vista disk the drivers will be integrated into the disk and you can ignore what follows. If it's a standard Microsoft Vista disk you need to find the drivers. According to the manual these are on the motherboard CD, which will create a driver disk on floppy. (Microsoft's idea of a joke.) You need to feed the floppy in when you boot the Vista disk, pressing F6 at some point. After that the recovery system should be able to see the raid array and fix it. Probably worth slipstreaming the raid drivers into the Vista disk using Nlite, but thats not an easy solution. Mike Johnson |
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posted: 2 Mar 2011 22:07 from: Ian Allen
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Hi Mike, We looked at doing a driver boot from a floppy, but could I find one at home ? No, lol. In the end we did a driver update via a USB stick, but still no real joy. Have found some recovery software from Runtime which may help, especially as they have trial downloads. RAID controller is an Nvidia nForce 750i SLI Southbridge. Vista is Ultimate 64bit. Ian |
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