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My wifes laptop died. Appears to just be the MOBO and the hard drives power up and seem to be fine. Went to Frys to get an external RAID enclosure which is working but windows disk manager shows that one of the two physical drives is unallocated and wants me to reformat the array. Upon further reading it seems that I can't just take a RAID 0 array and slap it in another controller and mount it. There is nothing on there that I can justify the data recovery price over but it would be darn annoying to have to redo some things. I have a back up of everything up till end of November. If its a write off I might lose a few itunes tracks and possibly some pics but my wifes Girl Scout and Cub Scout stuff would be a mountain of work to redo.

Can anyone help me out or refer me to someone who can? I figure its worth about $100 to me. More than that and I'll just cry into my beer and make sure she backs up more often.

Are you going to replace the systemboard in the laptop? If so, there is no reason you will lose any of the data on the hard drive.

If, instead, you are replacing the laptop, and you want to transfer the data from the old drive to the new system, then all you need is a SATA to USB adaptor. (Fry's has those too) Then you can plug the old drive into a USB port on the new laptop and it should recognize it as an external drive, and you can copy over.

Replacing the motherboard will likely introduce a different RAID controller. I have never heard of a RAID recovery working with a different controller. All it will want to do is initialize the drives, and doing so will erase important config data on the drives (it's been about 10+ years since I was a hardware guy, so things may have changed these days). Also, you can't take one drive from a RAID 0, plug it in via USB, and copy data. It only has 50% of your data. :)

a laptop with a RAID 0? I assume this is some kind of software RAID? I haven't come across a laptop with more than one HDD bay myself, but I am sure they are out there. What model laptop is it?

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; <-- this should fix your RAID issue. The demo will tell you if it can before you shell out the $99 to fix it.

And in the future, run a RAID 1. :-)

also, if you are comfortable with Linux, you can try 'mdadm' for a recovery. It can likely read your external controller, view the drives, and give you a chance to recover the data to an external drive.

pbwalker wrote:Replacing the motherboard will likely introduce a different RAID controller. I have never heard of a RAID recovery working with a different controller. All it will want to do is initialize the drives, and doing so will erase important config data on the drives (it's been about 10+ years since I was a hardware guy, so things may have changed these days). Also, you can't take one drive from a RAID 0, plug it in via USB, and copy data. It only has 50% of your data. :)

a laptop with a RAID 0? I assume this is some kind of software RAID? I haven't come across a laptop with more than one HDD bay myself, but I am sure they are out there. What model laptop is it?

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; <-- this should fix your RAID issue. The demo will tell you if it can before you shell out the $99 to fix it.

And in the future, run a RAID 1. :-)

LOL...you have been out for a while.

My old Alienware was RAID 1 and I have a Dell XPS that is RAID 0.

Its a Dell Inspiron 1721 that came standard RAID 0. Its quite common (at least the ones I get) for laptops to have RAID 0 on them these days. I have already bought a new computer since the dead one was 4 years old and I can't justify trying to fix it. I have the drives mounted in an external RAID enclosure that I got from FRY's to try and recover the data but I've learned that you have to use the exact same hardware controller if you want the drives to mount.

I'll check out those links...Thanks

olafpfj wrote:

pbwalker wrote:Replacing the motherboard will likely introduce a different RAID controller. I have never heard of a RAID recovery working with a different controller. All it will want to do is initialize the drives, and doing so will erase important config data on the drives (it's been about 10+ years since I was a hardware guy, so things may have changed these days). Also, you can't take one drive from a RAID 0, plug it in via USB, and copy data. It only has 50% of your data. :)

a laptop with a RAID 0? I assume this is some kind of software RAID? I haven't come across a laptop with more than one HDD bay myself, but I am sure they are out there. What model laptop is it?

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; <-- this should fix your RAID issue. The demo will tell you if it can before you shell out the $99 to fix it.

And in the future, run a RAID 1. :-)

LOL...you have been out for a while.

My old Alienware was RAID 1 and I have a Dell XPS that is RAID 0.

Its a Dell Inspiron 1721 that came standard RAID 0. Its quite common (at least the ones I get) for laptops to have RAID 0 on them these days. I have already bought a new computer since the dead one was 4 years old and I can't justify trying to fix it. I have the drives mounted in an external RAID enclosure that I got from FRY's to try and recover the data but I've learned that you have to use the exact same hardware controller if you want the drives to mount.

I'll check out those links...Thanks

Nice! I had no idea...I always was the kind of buyer that had to get the smallest, ultra-portable type machines...so I never got in to the desktop replacement systems. Those have got to weigh more than my 3lb Macbook Air.

Good luck on the recovery. Let us know how it works out!

Many Many Many Many thanks to you pbwalker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


As I suspected the drives were fine and the software from runtime had no difficulty in analyzing the drives. At $99 they are incredibly lower cost than anything else I could find and the analyze before you buy is awesome.

I am now transferring the drive.

My external backup drives are a pair of 1.5TB that are setup as just a simple drive with the other as backup of the first similar to RAID 1 but not actually mirrored. They are USB3 so I can't software RAID them. I also have a 750GB that is hardware RAID 1. The 750 is full so it lives in the safe now hence the new 1.5TB pair. I haven't wanted to run actual "Backups" of the whole computer so I have just been manually backing up the relevent files to the external by simply copying them there then I have the second drive setup to run a true backup of the first. Its how I've been doing things for years but now I need to get with the program and come up with a better way of backing up the laptops. Windows backup has always just been so slow and piggy that I just hate using it and have relied on RAID 1 and remembering to manually copy files to the backup RAID. Time for this dog to learn some new tricks I think.