RAID problem

A customer had a big ol' 6 year oldDell tower die, the MB failed. She had a drive C:, and drive D: was two 500gb SATA drives set as RAID0. Since she decided to step up into some modern high end gear, we built her a rockin' new tower (new DDR3, Intel i7, 600gb Raptor, Intel mobo), with dual boot (Win7 Pro X64 and WinXP Pro), and she wants/needs to have the same RAID0 set up and running in the new tower without any data loss. Is this possible? I've gone into the RAID configurator on the mobo, and it shows the two 500gb drives, and I can probably set up the RAID0, but it's been my experience that doing this will wipe out the drives. Up to this point, everything has gone smooth, installing both the WinXP and Win7, setting up the dual boot, drivers, etc, it all went well. But now I'm stuck on this RAID0 thing, and losing the data is NOT an option....

 

Oh, one other thing, when I try to install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver, it errors out with "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software". WTF?!??!!!!?!????!!? Intel i7 950 CPU, 6gb DDR3, 2x500gb + 160gb + 600gb SATA hard drives. This doesn't meet the specs??!?!!!!???! What's up with that? The mobo manual says to install the Intel Storage Matrix which doesn't exist for this motherboard (Intel DX58SO), so I'm assuming it's the same as the Rapid Storage driver.....
:banghead

 

OK - the research I've done shows me that if you have a hardware RAID0 set up and the mobo fails, and the replacement mobo is not exactly the same, it is impossible to simply assign your two RAID0 drives and have 'em work again. The hardware RAID BIOS wants to reformat the drives to build the RAID. This sucks. If anyone knows of a way to rebuild a RAID0 when the motherboard has been swapped out, PLEASE post!! In the meantime, I'll be researching this, but I'm not real hopeful.
:cry

 

Hey dlb

My personal suggestion would be to find the same exact model motherboard (eBay possibly) in order to move the data onto other media (an external HDD, etc.). It may cost a little bit of money, but in the long run, that's the simplest solution, and will definitely be cheaper than data recovery services.

If you're hell bent on doing it the hard way, this page may be of some help (note the comment):

http://spench.net/drupal/node/82

 

The eBay route isn't really possible for a number of reasons, but I appreciate the input. On the other hand, that link has some good info and I'll have to spend a bit more time reading it.

Now - I have made some progress. I got the Intel Storage Technology driver to install. And I got as far as the screen shot below. Now, it only offers to save the data from ONE of the drives. Does this mean the OTHER drivbe will be wiped? Or will it be left alone? Or what?

(GEEZ!! for the average home user, anything other than a mirrored RAID (RAID1) seems to be WAY more trouble than it's worth!)

 

Heh... yeah, I wouldn't mess with anything except mirrored or mirrored/striped (4 drives, forget the RAID number) myself.

Maybe instead of the Create tab, you could try the Manage tab?

I'd definitely do the reading up before pressing any buttons, since yeah, it seems to only want to let you keep data from one drive from your screenshot. That wouldn't work so well!

 

I did more reading, and found a discouraging statement in the help file (attached a shot below). Good suggestion of trying the "Manage" option.... maybe it will let me simply recontruct the RAID.

*fingers crossed*

 

UPDATE - due to the important nature of the data on the RAID0 drives, we sent 'em to a local data recovery house that we have worked with in the past. They do great work (and therefore charge out the wahzoo) so all is likely to be OK.

In the "where was this 2-3 days ago" category, I saw this on today's MG front page (Sept 21 2010) -
ReclaiMe RAID Recovery (yup- it's freeware too!)

 

Haha. That's too bad.

I'm curious as to why you couldn't have simply gotten an identical motherboard to pull the data off...

 

The previous PC was a 6-7 year old Dell XPS. It was top-o-the-line when it was purchased brand new (over $3000US). It had dual Geforce 7950's in SLI, a weird proprietary power supply, and a weird proprietary "upside-down-and-backward" motherboard. We searched far and wide and the cheapest board we could find was about $350.00 for a used one. The owner of the PC said she was ready upgrade anyway (a professional graphic designer should NOT be using 7 year old gear). She wanted an 'open architecture' new 64bit system (esp since WinXP is really on its way out) that she could add to and upgrade as needed. So we built her a new Intel i7 system, after giving her the option of buying the used $350 Dell mobo. She (wisely) said "No- build the new PC". We explained the risks involved with the RAID0, and she said "Do it anyway - if the drives don't come up on the new PC, we'll figure something out".

 

But won't the data recovery service charge more than the $350 that motherboard would cost? I definitely understand about getting a new computer... I'm simply talking cheapest/easiest/fastest way to get the data off those drives. Obviously, the motherboard purchase would be exclusively for retrieving the data from the drives, and you could resell it/bin it.

Obviously, if the data recovery service charges LESS than $350, then that makes sense.

 

We have a good working relationship with the data recovery folks (we send 'em A LOT of business), and they already told us $150 max or $0 if they can't do it . . . and they've always pulled through, so the $200 savings is totally worth it. The owner of the PC/data has relaxed a bit about her time constraints, and has also checked her stash of backups, and it looks like there's only about 20gb out of over 700gb that is really important, so we're shooting for just that 20gb at this point. We have a good idea of file dates and names, so it should be OK!

* fingers crossed *

 

Aha, so the data recovery service is cheaper... that's obviously better then! I just hope they can get the job done. Thankfully, you don't have the normal data recovery issues of corrupted/overwritten data or damaged disks.

 

That's a good forensics price, dlb - wish we had a lab like that close by. I've had to use Ontrack by mail a couple of times, and talk about charging out the wahzoo - yikes!

 

I agree it's a great price, which is why I assumed a $350 motherboard would be cheaper!

 

Yea i have seen it a few times with customers that bought dell machines and had drives raided, drive fails and blame lost data, customers usually like wtf why would they raid a drive whats the purpose, so many questions lol. Glad you had data recovery as a cheap option.

 

Agreed: I know nothing about RAID, other than what I've read, so correct me if I'm wrong. Why RAID0 a normal user's machine? I'm all for the RAID1 mirror backup, but it seems like RAID0 is just a disaster waiting to happen, unless space is critical - and with today's vast, cheap storage, space ain't critical to the normal user.

No hijack intended - just a question, then I'll hush. :major

 

RAID0 is for speed... tandem two 7500 RPM drives, and you get 15,000 RPM write/read speed.

It's NOT for backup or reliability. Strictly performance. When using graphics-intensive programs that are reading/writing a lot of data (such as it appears this particular issue encompasses), that could be a plus. However, I would RAID 4 drives (double speed + backup) in that case, myself.