Forum Moderators: open
Anyway, as luck would have it, I already had a new replacement computer in a box that I purchased a day before the old one crashed (just weird luck and a sense that my computer was on its last legs). One more day and this would be a non-issue.
My question is, I believe my two RAID drives that were set up as the master in the 0 configuration are fine. My new computer is now up and running and am working on it now. Before messing with RAID on my last computer, I always have taken my master drive and installed it as a slave on my new computer so I had easy access to my old user data making a smooth transition.
This time my old C drive was RAID 0 configured. Can I set my old RAID 0 drives as a slave drive on my new computer or does the RAID 0 config need to be the master?
My new computer is the latest and greatest and is RAID capable so it can do whatever RAID can do, but I was hoping to verify what I want to do is possible before I spend the time trying to make the impossible work. I would guess it is possible, but am hoping there is a hardware guru in my favorite forum that has a quick answer.
Thanks!
Most likely, when you plug in the two drives they will show up in the RAID bios as two blank drives. If that's the case look for an option like "rescue RAID set" that will let you manually set the RAID parameters without writing info to the disks. Set them exactly as they were on the original board and it should be able to read the data. Be very careful though and read the manual to make sure the "rescue" option doesn't write anything to the disks or your data will be gone for good.
Oddly enough I had this exact same thing happen to me about two months ago, and my lax backup routine left a few files on my desktop that I didn't have backed up. I upgraded my entire computer but also found the exact same motherboard I had on eBay for $24 and rescued my files and have a second computer as well.
Oh, and if you do get the RAID array working on the new computer you can set the boot order in the BIOS.
William.
I tried rebooting a few times same drive error message. I looked at the bios and the only drive it could find was my external backup drive. Unplugged that and computer booted normally. Plugged external USB backup back in and the new computer recognized it. New computer back to normal. Beads of sweat wiped off brow.
I just ran the two RAID drives up to the local computer store. It seems one of the drives is bad. The say there is still a chance they can pull my outlook email PST files off the good drive with some special software they have for $100 if they can get at them, so I told them to give it a shot. Otherwise I'll be missing a few months of email records, not the end of the world but I get lots of email correspondence and track lots of tasks via outlook.
I'll never do Raid 0 again. Twice the chance of a drive failure taking main drive down.
Fingers crossed.
I have finally recovered about everything that my last hard drive solution "One Touch" did not back up automatically. It gets all the main files but misses some imported things - in XP most of the document and settings folders (which includes the Outlook data files, bookmarks, and other program settings)and the drives shared folder.
Maybe any complete backup solution would require a reboot? I just don't want to worry about what my next back up solution is not backing up automatically. Externally hard drives are cheap enough and big enough to grab everything.
Backup system suggestions anyone?
get a big external HD USB or e-sata, set it all up and it will to the job fine.
If if it does a regular file by file backup, thanks for the tip.
Keep in mind that that the type of backup that Vista Complete PC Backup creates can not be used to restore single files -- it can only restore the entire hard disk. For that reason, Microsoft recommends that even though you use Complete PC Backup, you still use the standard backup utility on a regular basis.
Anyone know of a backup utility that backs up everything as normal files instead of a giant image file? The big problem with an image is if a file or directory gets deleted there is no easy way to restore just that file or directory.
Onetouch is almost great, it does one complete backup of all drives on a computer, then each night it backs up the new and changed files in under 10 minutes. The problem is it misses a lot of important files and directories which then need to be backed up manually.
I switched over to my new computer and want to get a more complete backup solution up and running instead of using Maxtor Onetouch again.
again all this can be done with windows backup
or you could use something like Acronis True Image to make an image everyday
[edited by: J_RaD at 3:00 pm (utc) on July 1, 2009]
