Well, it had to happen sooner or later... But now what?

I had a sweet setup here at work. My C: drive was a standard SATA WD Raptor 34.7 GB, and my D: was a pair of 80 GB WD Raptors in RAID 0, using the on-board Intel 82801FR SATA RAID controller. I have never liked Windows keeping the user hive the way it does on the C: drive, and so had gone to considerable grief to move it to D:\Users\... (a lot shorter than C:\Documents and Settings\...). So along with most of my work data, my user data (which changes more often) was kept away from my installed software, and defragged, etc. It worked well and was very fast.

But while I went east on vacation, one of the RAID Drives apparently went south. I back up a lot of work data to our server, but there is a stack of stuff on that drive I'd like to recover. I'll probably end up sending the drive to the pros, but thought it might be good to see if anybody has any other ideas (and any good experience with a particular data recovery vendor).

I've checked the cables, restarted several times, isolated the bad drive, and have the "Intel Matrix Storage Console" open, but I don't think I have a lot of options here- unless one of y'all know something. OS is Windows XP SP2 under Windows Small Business Server 2003.

I'm fairly experienced, as well - been at these things since punch-card days, generally build my own boxes, did some machine-level stuff in college, good in several program languages. I don't know my way around the registry that well, but not afraid to get at it with proper direction.

And I posted this as a warning! RAID 0 is risky without regular backup! (Captain Obvious, over and out...!)

Now you know why I chose my screen name...

Thanks all,

Dangerous Tom

You can try Spinrite ($89, 100% satisfaction gaurantee) on the failed drive. Otherwise I suggest you send it out. Ontrack has a free eval and gives you a list of recoverable files before you have to pay.
Data Recovery Services, Software, Solutions - Ontrack Data Recovery

I've had success with both.

Spinrite is fairly good and so is datarecovery from runtime. I have used them both and both work very well for data recovery. Neither worked worth a damn for photo recoverythough as the final output of the recovered photos were scratchy and streaky.

Thank you both. I spoke with Spinrite, and they said it won't help, as the drive isn't even seen by the controller, long before Windows gets rolling - so I may be seding it out, if our insurance will help out...

Funny, I'd been saying it's about time to burn some DVD's. But with vacation and a couple of trips thrown in there, well, that's what you get!

Later,

Tom

Here's a good backup solution that will backup on a schedule. So there is no more 'I'll back it up tomorrow'.
Complete hard disk drive copy, cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copying