please just shoot me...

[delmer_1]

Well, yesterday, i was sitting in my livingroom when suddenly i hear the windowsxp startup sound. THis alarmed me because my PC was already on. I walked over to look at it, and it had rebooted itself. I clicked on IE and it didnt' load, then all of my icons and task bar dissapeared.(apparently exlporer.exe locked up) then they came back..i clicked on IE again, BLUE SCREEN. before i could read it, it rebooted. it did teh normal CPU and memory check, found my CD rom drives, got to the Highpoint onboard RAID controller and detected my two hard drives..then rebooted. THat is all i can get it to do. I purchased a new HD today hoping that i could somehow get the files off of my old drives copied onto it. BUt i have not had any luck. I loaded windowsXP on the new drive and went to disk administrator. it sees the other two drives, but they are "Unallocated" i would really like to get this data off of these drives. they are both Maxtor 30gb 7200rpm drives connected to my highpoint raid controller that is built into my motherboard. I had them configured into two 30GB stripe sets(RAID-0). I have a feeling only one of them is bad, but since i was using striping, i can't get anyting off of either of them. I am going to try to repair the windows isntallation on the drives, but i doubt it will work... am i just screwed? I had 15GB of data that i really wanted. about half of that was MP3s(ripped from my own CDs) but there were alot of personal files and drawings and stuff i have done..plus my resume, and all kinds of important stuff. is there anything i can do? i know maxtor has a utility i can run to check the integrity of the drives, but it will erase whats on them, so i dont' want to run it until i am positive there is nothign i can do to get my files back..any suggestions?

[Gollo]

I would reinistall windows. If you want, you could shell out big bucks and send the drives to a data retrieval center. No garuntees there though.

[geeksRus]

HERE is a FREE data recovery program that will recover from FAT and NTFS partitions...worth a shot. good luck.

[delmer_1]

thanks, but that didn't seem to work. probaby due to the fact that it was part of a stipe set. i have a feeling all of my data is lost man i hate computers sometimes. the sad this is, i was planning on buying a new hard drive today and backing up my stuff onto it and reloading everything...guess i was a day too late. so I highly suggest all of you do a backup if you haven't done one in a while, because stuff like this can sneak up on you pretty easy.

[clarinathan]

I think that due to the way a strip set works if you loose one drive then the only way to possibly get some data back is to try a speciallist recover place. However, that costs serious money.

Are you certain that the drives are dead?

Unfortunately as I said above if one of the drives is dead then I am afraid you are stuck.

Have you though about getting a couple more drives and setting up a Stripe set with mirror?

[GokuSS2]

And people wonder why I keep my main Data on my 80 Maxtor and not my RAID 0 Drive.

Sorry Dude.

[delmer_1]

well, thanks for all of your help. I did in fact lose everything.

i downloaded Maxtor's diagnostics program and booted to it. the first drive passed the tests, the second one did not. on the quick test, it said that the drive had errors and that i should run the advanced test, so i did. it said that it had errors, and that it could try to repair the errors. so i said "OK" and it repaired it. i then did a low-level format.(which takes forever) i recreated the stripe set and partitioned it as one 60GB partition. I installed windows to it and used my new 80gb WD drive for data. that was yesterday, so far, so good. at least this way if it is bad and dies again, i only lose windows.(isn't like i have any files to lose anyway, but still the few that i do have should be fine on the new drive) I need a bigger case, because i only have room for 2 hard drives, so the third one is just kinda sitting in there right now until i get paid again. i plan on purchasing a second western digital 80gb drive just like my new one and mirroring them. that way windows and my applications are all running from the stripe set for performance, and my data is mirrored for reliability. it really sucks that i lost all of my stuff. I have most of the music burned to MP3 disks that i use in my car, so i won't have to rip them all back from the original CDs, so that shoudlnt take too long, however i lost all of my artwork i had made with Bryce5, which makes me sad. oh well, i learned a big lesson. and now i have all kinds of free disk space to fill up

thanks again for your help.

[geeksRus]

isn't it funny that we bitch and moan about the users that never make backups(they probably don't know what backups are) and yet we are just as guilty if not more so. i include myself in this group so don't think that is a personal slam.

[Garak]

surely if it's only the second hard disc in the stripe, you should be able to recover the data off the first drive with something like Ontrack Easy Recovery???

[vapd]

I've had such bad luck with IBM drives and now Maxtor that I have luckily been backing up correctly for first time really. Just as well as yet another of the Max drives in my raid 0 developed bad sectors and although after fixing the pc is still working win is very unstable :-( I feel a format comong on and a return to no raid...

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by Garak
surely if it's only the second hard disc in the stripe, you should be able to recover the data off the first drive with something like Ontrack Easy Recovery???

If you want to get back loads of 'half' files then yes, striping is generally putting half of each file on each disk.....

So to recover data out of a striped volume is much more tricky, if this had been mirroring it would have been so easy...

This is why you see 'professional' RAID cards using all those fancy combinations of 0 & 1 to give the balance of speed gains against data integrity.....

[delmer_1]

I know, i feel like an idiot. I am constantly telling people to backup their files, but i never do it.

I really wish i would have purches 4 drives instead of two, so i could have done RAID0+1 and mirrored my stripes...oh well, too late now

[Garak]

Originally posted by confus-ed
If you want to get back loads of 'half' files then yes, striping is generally putting half of each file on each disk.....

So to recover data out of a striped volume is much more tricky, if this had been mirroring it would have been so easy...

This is why you see 'professional' RAID cards using all those fancy combinations of 0 & 1 to give the balance of speed gains against data integrity.....

Ahh, I see.. RAID is not something I have toyed with.... yet

[Damned Angel]

[PacMan]

Ahh man,
I just had this crap happen to me last weekend!! I’m not using RAID so I was able to retrieve most of my files with different programs. I just downloaded data recovery programs from kazaa and am fine now. But damn I know the feeling too many times. I idiotically deleted partitions twice in my life which did not need to be deleted! But even when you get the files back, some of them have errors on them. As soon as you screw up a HD, don’t reinstall anything on there until u get ur data back.

Just wanted to say “I know your pain: and I’m going through it right now as I am still trying to find out what files were retrieved corrupt. It’s around 35 gigs of stuff I deleted and most of it was music I created myself and a lot of lyrical work I wrote down. It’s like a painter losing all his paintings.
But anyways, good luck bro and almost all the people here are so helpful, try their suggestions.

Take it easy..