mikex Posted June 20, 2007 Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 I am looking at a Dell XPS 3.xx cpu, 2gig ram. dual WD 250 HDD in a RAID ARRAY. The guy used his vista cd from his dell laptop to upgrade his dell xp pro desktop to vista. The activation period expired, he could not get in to anything on the XPS. I was going to copy the hdd to my machine to backup his data. After I pulled the SATA cable I realized that was a no go because I do not have SATA on my machine. Now during boot it shows RAID striped Failed. The bios will see both hdd's but shows neither as bootable. I tried booting with XP in to the recovery console but it shows the drives not accessible. Looking for pointers, would like to save the data ( approx 100Gis photos/music).M Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 20, 2007 Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 (edited) I AM JUST GUESSING(USE MY ADVICE WITH CAUTION). Assuming it is using hardware Raid, you should try and enter the raid utility at bootup. Then I would check for an option to resync(rebuild) the drives. Edited June 20, 2007 by shanenin Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikex Posted June 20, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 there is a ---Press CTRL-I to enter configuration utility....------ I didn't try it, went to bed instead. Will try this evening if the wife does not have me working 'till midnight when I get home.Thanks.M Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 20, 2007 Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 I asked a freind with lots of raid experience and he backed what I said. He said make sure that you have the drives in the same order as they were originally. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikex Posted June 20, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 (edited) they are thankspass on a word of thanks to the friend also.MLooking at newegg for gender changers. can come in real handy. laptop drives, sata drives, and ide drives all through usb. need to order one. Edited June 20, 2007 by mikex Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 20, 2007 Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 I just ordered this one a couple of days ago. I should be getting it tomorrow. I do have sata on my board, but it is flaky. I also like the idea of being able to bring this one on jobs. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikex Posted June 20, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 Great minds....I kept going back to that one also.post back on the quality/performance/good/bad/ugly thoughts on it, after you had it for a bit. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 20, 2007 Report Share Posted June 20, 2007 It is $11 off, it may go up in price in a few days. I will let you know how it works. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikex Posted June 21, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2007 (edited) raid is fixed thanks.next is to temp repair of vista so I can try to move data off....OR downgrade from Vista to xp pro, from cmd prompt, with out losing data-long shot.GRRRR M^^^After thoughtBeing this is a raid 0 would I be able to use an adaptor like the one you ordered to recover data? Again it is dual 250g hdds. but showing less than 200 mb free?Excuse me as I am not in to raid arrays.M Edited June 21, 2007 by mikex Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 21, 2007 Report Share Posted June 21, 2007 (edited) That raid array is dependent on the hardware raid controller on the motherboard. The two harddrives need to stay connected to that motherboard to recover the data. I would see two options. Goto the dell website and download the sata drivers for that board, then make a driver disc(floppy). Then I would boot Bart PE . it will prompt you to press F6 to load the raid drives from a floppy. This is needed so bartpe can read the sata drives. Now using a usb drive or another internal ide drive, you can copy his data. The second option would be to use a live linux cd, using the same method as bart pe. It should have built in sata support.As you said. You could also try and do a repair install of vista. You could also install XP on a separate IDE harddrive. Then once XP is running you could use that OS to copy his files off his vista drive. Edited June 21, 2007 by shanenin Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 21, 2007 Report Share Posted June 21, 2007 Let me know what method you end up using to recover the data. I have never had to recover data from a raid array before, the info will be handy. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikex Posted June 22, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 22, 2007 (edited) UPDATEPulled a 120 gig backup drive from my primary machine, dumped the data from it to the primary drive. Installed xp in the XPS machine on the 120. Copying the files to the 120 as I type.Googleing "how may gray hairs will I get to downgrade from vista to XP?"MAnother UpdateBy 10:30 pm all data to be saved was copied and XP loaded on the raid volume and Saved Data being copied back to the raid volume. Edited June 22, 2007 by mikex Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted June 30, 2007 Report Share Posted June 30, 2007 Great minds....I kept going back to that one also.post back on the quality/performance/good/bad/ugly thoughts on it, after you had it for a bit.I like it. I has Tested it on both SATA and IDE drives. It seems to work really well. I like the design also, it looks cool :-) Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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