Accidentally put Win7 boot disk in a RAID 0 array..

is there any way to get my data back?

 

Slave the disk or put it in a USB caddy and try using a recovery program:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html

Recuva works pretty well and the deep scan does a good job. I have used another which did a really good job although I don't remember which. Judging by what I have installed on the computer it most likely was UndeleteMyFiles or PC Inspector.

Make sure you save recovered data to a different disk to the one you're recovering from or you run the risk of overwriting yet-unrecovered data.

 

I don't suppose Recuva or any of these other free programs have boot capability?

I never got a Windows 7 CD with my computer and so I had to order a replacement which won't be here till Monday at the earliest... would rather not be without my computer for the weekend

 

(or, alternatively, could I boot the computer using a Win XP disc even though it's a brand new model, and then run the recovery tool from a USB stick or something else ?)

 

A comment over at the Recuva support forum (didn't realize it was by Piriform, by the way!) said that Recuva can't actually recover the Windows installation itself, i.e. restore the disk to good booting & working condition.

Is there such thing as a free or reasonably priced product that would do that?

 

Sorry, haven't been around much lately and thought someone else would probably follow up.

Booting from the disk that has lost data on it isn't a good move. Anything you do with the disk such as booting, shutting down, defragging, copying, moving, has the capacity to overwrite data on the disk, the data that you want to get back. Therefore it's important that you slave the disk or put it in an external USB case and use another hard drive to run the computer. Another approach is to use a bootable USB stick or CD that won't write anything to the hard drive. Then any data that's found should be saved to a disk OTHER than the one you're rescuing it from so that you don't overwrite still unrescued data.

However, that said, reading over your other questions sounds like the data you were wanting to get back was the Windows installation itself. Although there is a possibility of that, it's probably easier and more reliable to do a fresh installation, that way you know all the correct Windows files are present and in their correct places and you won't have problems with user accounts not owning their own files. In the short term, a version of Linux could be installed or run from a CD or flash drive to give you a functional computer. Please note that if you decide to install Linux on your computer and then install Windows again later, the Linux installation may be damaged by Windows. Linux is pretty good about figuring out there's a Windows (or other) installation and co-existing but Windows isn't designed to do the same "out of the box."