How to transfer my stripe HD in another machine?

[Jo The Veteran]

I have a really huge problem, my windows disk seems to fail all of the times (bad sectors). Sometimes windows load, sometimes i have to treat it with chkdsk and other programs in order to boot. I think it doesn't have much life in it left. I also have another disk in that machine which works as storage and seems to be fine. A 2 disks, 400GB WD SATA Stripe 2+0/RAID0.

Question. Is it possible to transfer it on another machine, and keep it's original layout, WITHOUT loosing any data from it? (It's really loaded with data - only 25GB left).

The first time i installed it in my machine, I do remember setting it up for speed, rather that security. I also think I formated it, but that was maybe because it was unformated file system and windows wouldn't open it otherwise. Now it is NTFS.
What would happen if i connected it in the other machine, in the SATA bus and turned on Windows? Would they recognize it's layout AND it's data it contains? Or whould anything really bad happens?

BTW, is it possible these bad sectors to occur due to power failures? I had a power failure 1 week ago and windows wouldn't boot. I chkdisk them and they did and chkdsk also showed me 2 bad sectors. Yesterday we had a black out for about 4 hours due to damages in the elec. network by severe winds. Windows booted normally after that, worked fine for about 8 hours and then crashed with blue screens everywhere and didn't boot again.

[glockjs]

you can ghost the old hdd onto a new hdd if you want everything the same. i dont know if that would be a good idea though if everything has been corrupted.

there are programs out there to recover corrupt data. infact i bought one the other weekend that worked rather well. ill have to look at the name when i get home. just recover as much as possible and start over with a fresh install.

as far as hooking the hdd up to another computer you MIGHT get it to load the OS but more than likely you'll get alot of errors due to wrong drivers

[rallynavvie]

And this is exactly why I tell people not to run RAID 0 ever, especially not on their boot volume.

If you take the array to another machine you will very likely lose everything on there as the new RAID controller will want to reformat everything to its own liking. Even if the chipsets are exactly the same you may have this issue.

You'd best go out and get an external HDD large enough and backup any data you can. Moving to a new PC is going to require you to re-install your OS and applications anyway so don't bother with that just your documents and such to move to the new PC.

Now those drives may not be a total loss. Once you've copied the needed files bring them singly into your new system and do a complete format and run some drive checking utilities. I believe WD has their own that you may want to try. And please next time DO NOT enable RAID 0. If you absolutely must have that sort of sustained I/O from your boot volume at least run it nested (which would require 4 identical drives). The ONLY reason EVER to run RAID 0 is for a fast scratch volume for applications to use. Since scratch space is temporary it won't make much difference if the array takes a dump.

Good lord, can we sticky this as a caveat to others please?

[ahhaa]

whew, Jo...

your problem may not be as bad as you think, but its like you drink&drive and then blame the car for your crash

at an absolute minimum, a HD needs 10% of its capacity free or it can't do its own internal maintenance. I'm pretty sure your HD is massively fragmented- its drowning, man!

This can be easily fixed- copy off or delete files til about 15% is free space. The built-in defrag tool has an analyze function so you can look before you leap.

Most new HDs come with cloning software, but you need free space on the old drive to make the image files.


Uninterruptible Power Supplies go on sale for $40 or less. One brand even comes with $20,000 in lightning failure insurance. Once you have one, you wonder how you got along without. (& you can stick answering machines and phones on'em so they work during outages 8) )

[Jo The Veteran]

Thank you all for your replies. I will adress you all by order of appearance so you'd know in what state i am now and if possible help me.

I bought a ups yesterday and also said goodbye to my old windows installation. They wouldn't boot whatever i tried. I installed winxp over it and backup data right now.

glockjs - Ghost would have been a good option for the RAID array, however i don't have the space for it's data. I need about 300GB (or more) worth of disk for that ghost image. I'm left with less that 100 in all of my disks combined. I could try and write it in dvds but that would take about 65 of them . Just not worth it when i'm sure there's something else i can do to salvage the data.

rallynavvie- Believe me, i was always terrified by the chance of anything going wrong, while i had the disks in RAID 0. However there was ALLOT of data in it to sort, and then write. Then there was new data coming to replace the old data i removed... you know how it is. There was a time i had it emptied about 250GB. I should have written those 150 GBs somewhere else and splitt the @%@$#% thing into 2 seperate drives. What can i say? I was stupid at that time!

ahhaa - The disk wasn't fragmenteted at all, i'm very thorough with that, even the RAID disk has been defraged. (Before everything got $#%^^up that is, because now i can't access it at all). It has to be those power faillures that %^%$# up the disk.


I don't really care about windows cause i backed up more or less the stuff i needed. Programs can be reinstalled so i'm gonna format it for good. I believe full format would recognize the bad sectors as "bad", and in so, not use them, right?

However i have another issue with the RAID array now.
I have the chaintech 7NJS MB on this machine and i can't find it's drivers for RAID. The funny thing is that I'm sure i have them in the RAID disk, however I need them installed in order to access them :-p.
Any ideas where to find them? I googled it, and found reviews and other stuff, but the link to the drivers always goes to the chaintech main page, which has been shut-down.
Would using a driver detective, or any of these apps appearing in many driver sites do anything? or would my pc end up with a ton or trojans?

I though this while i was diagnosing the #$%^@# up disk.
Is it possible to access the array disks from dos? Partition magic can see it as ONE disk, and so does Norton Ghost but they are not tools for accessing it. If i could just access it, i could extract the driver from it and make it work in windows.

Also, another theory, which i quite sure won't work. If I split the disks now and load them into another machine as regular SATA drives, and not array, what whould hapen to the data in them? Whould windows recognize them? Or would they require format?

[glockjs]

wow i fail at reading been a long week and i miss key words like raid and stripe x.O

anyways here's the software i bought the other weekend and it worked flawlessly http://www.file-recovery.net/features.htm

i got the standard and it states works with raid setups. give the demo a go since you computer can see the drive as one you might have some luck. the only downside is the demo is limited to 64kb so see if you can recover a small file

[Jo The Veteran]

YES!!!! I found them!!! ! Man, those drivers where hard to find.
Ok, no need to bother you with them anymore, however i'll leave the link here and the description for anyone else also searching for them.

Description : Promise FastTrak 378 RAID Driver V1.00.1.37
For CHAINTECH 7NJS Zenith Ultra MB (And others).
Filename : 378raid_100137.zip
Link : http://files.filefront.com/Promise+FastTrak+378+RAID+Driver+V100137/;4156769;/fileinfo.html
Comments : I Love you filefront !!!

[Jo The Veteran]

wow i fail at reading been a long week and i miss key words like raid and stripe x.O

anyways here's the software i bought the other weekend and it worked flawlessly http://www.file-recovery.net/features.htm

i got the standard and it states works with raid setups. give the demo a go since you computer can see the drive as one you might have some luck. the only downside is the demo is limited to 64kb so see if you can recover a small file

No man, you missunderstood. I have 3 disks. 1 WD full of bad sectors, and 2 other WD in RAID array. The first one will be formated eventually and i have recovered most of my needed files from it. I can't save the windows installation though and i have lots of settings and programs in it but, oh well. Programs can be reinstalled, right? Thanks for the infor though ! Seems like a decent program. I hope i won't need it in the future however

[glockjs]

yeah more than likely i didnt understand. more than a lil sleep deprevated this week lol. well sounds like you got a handle on it. gl!

[Jo The Veteran]

Well I didn't really salvage anything, the windows disk was my original target but that was beyong repear. I'm just glad I haven't lost the array data as well (about 338 GB unsaved data) .
Thanks for answering however. I've always wanted to know how other people see the array RAID 0. Now I know