Motherboard died and need to retrieve data from Harddrive

[dopangle]

I have a customer that brought in a dead dell computer 7yrs old. It has 3 hard drives in it. He wants email and pics of hard drive. I hooked all three hard drives up to bench computer and it tells me to format drives. Was this a raid system? Customer did not know he had 3 seperate hard drives in computer. What woul be good way to tell if this was raid. What would be best program to use to get data for him?

Thanks,
Donny

 

[Rob_NNCC]

1st. STOP doing anything with the drives untill you have more info.
1,5st. Verifiy that the old motherboard is dead. Getting the old system up and running is by FAR the easiest way to recover data.
2nd. look at the system, what model is it? Does it have a PCI or PCI 64bit card these drives where added to. OR, what onboard controller does it have?
3rd. Find another controller card of same make/model and hook the drives up to that.
4th. DO NOT create a new raid, see about importing a raid volume, most likely raid 0 or 5.
5th. If you can't do that, send it to a pro.

 

[xxsilk109xx]

Have you tried hooking it up to the computer and run a linux boot disk on it? Have not tried with a raid setup before, but I have seen Windows tell me this same thing before, but when I boot to ubuntu, I get access to the drives and all files on them.

hope that helps

 

[crashtech]

Often there are clues that point to whether the drives were in RAID, first off, the drives being the same size and brand are a big clue, though not strictly necessary. If the machine was a high performance Dell, like an XPS, it's more likely that it was configured in RAID.

If the controller is on an expansion card the easiest thing to do would be to move the controller to a different system. This is unlikely, though.

Maybe it's just the power supply. Did you try to get the old girl running, or did you just tear her down?

 

[compnet]

I think ubuntu disk utility or gparted will tell you if its a raid component

 

[glricht]

Wouldn't the BIOS tell you if RAID were involved? (Of course, if it's software RAID, then all bets are off.)

 

[NYJimbo]

Wouldn't the BIOS tell you if RAID were involved? (Of course, if it's software RAID, then all bets are off.)

Most motherboards with a RAID option are just enablers. If you have RAID enabled it COULD be RAIDed, but doesnt have to be. I see computers all the time with RAID enabled in the BIOS but they are not RAID configured. So I don't think that BIOS setting will help too much.

 

[coffee]

I have a customer that brought in a dead dell computer 7yrs old. It has 3 hard drives in it. He wants email and pics of hard drive. I hooked all three hard drives up to bench computer and it tells me to format drives. Was this a raid system? Customer did not know he had 3 seperate hard drives in computer. What woul be good way to tell if this was raid. What would be best program to use to get data for him?

Thanks,
Donny

What the other posts say is good advice.

On all dell products there is a service tag number. You will use this to reference the original config of the system. You can then find out what controller was used in the build of the dell. It might be possible then to get a hold of a original controller (if raid) and in the controller bios it will have an option to recover the raid.

I have run into situations where in a raid one of the drives will die and trigger one of the other drives to go offline. Therefore its possible to recover the raid when it shows 2 bad drives. Not always (somewhat rare)but can sometimes work with raid5 setups.

You probably will spend alot of time on this and have some conversations with dell support on the issue. Balance that against a qoute for data recovery from an expert and then make the decision to work on it or not.

Best Regards,

coffee