From: E on
Paul wrote:

>
> It's really a question of time versus money tradeoff, as to how long
> it would take to copy the data and get it into a form you can use.
> There is RAID recovery software out there, and at least some of it
> will demonstrate it knows the format, by "teasing" you with file names
> and the like. (At least some of the products are "try before you buy",
> effectively holding the data for ransom until you buy the product.)
> So if you have more money to spend, and less time available,
> there is probably software that can copy the data for you right now.
> ("dd" is for poor people like me :-) )
>
> And yes, the Dell connectors will undoubtedly be a challenge. All
> part of the fun. I can see Michael Dell laughing now.
>


Hey Paul

Upon your suggestion I did a search for a Linux solution to my problem,
lo and behold...

Here is someone with almost the exact same problem (XPS 720 instead of
600), and a Linux based solution.

Accept that he uses a Python script. I assume there is a Python
interpreter on the open live Suse CD. I don't see a command in the
script to envoke DD, it seems to just use commands that I guess are
native to Python to do the reads and writes.

The owner of the Dell can't afford the repair or new PC at this point,
but the data is important to her son, who has games bought online with
the registration keys for those games somewhere within the interlaced
files in the RAID 0 array. So I may give this a shot.

Eddie
From: E on
E wrote:
> Paul wrote:
>
>>
>> It's really a question of time versus money tradeoff, as to how long
>> it would take to copy the data and get it into a form you can use.
>> There is RAID recovery software out there, and at least some of it
>> will demonstrate it knows the format, by "teasing" you with file names
>> and the like. (At least some of the products are "try before you buy",
>> effectively holding the data for ransom until you buy the product.)
>> So if you have more money to spend, and less time available,
>> there is probably software that can copy the data for you right now.
>> ("dd" is for poor people like me :-) )
>>
>> And yes, the Dell connectors will undoubtedly be a challenge. All
>> part of the fun. I can see Michael Dell laughing now.
>>
>
>
> Hey Paul
>
> Upon your suggestion I did a search for a Linux solution to my problem,
> lo and behold...
>
> Here is someone with almost the exact same problem (XPS 720 instead of
> 600), and a Linux based solution....

Oops, forgot this...
http://teratechnologies.net/stevekamerman/index.php?entry=entry090528-010324

>
> Accept that he uses a Python script. I assume there is a Python
> interpreter on the open live Suse CD. I don't see a command in the
> script to envoke DD, it seems to just use commands that I guess are
> native to Python to do the reads and writes.
>
> The owner of the Dell can't afford the repair or new PC at this point,
> but the data is important to her son, who has games bought online with
> the registration keys for those games somewhere within the interlaced
> files in the RAID 0 array. So I may give this a shot.
>
From: Paul on
E wrote:

>> Hey Paul
>>
>> Upon your suggestion I did a search for a Linux solution to my
>> problem, lo and behold...
>>
>> Here is someone with almost the exact same problem (XPS 720 instead of
>> 600), and a Linux based solution....
>
> Oops, forgot this...
> http://teratechnologies.net/stevekamerman/index.php?entry=entry090528-010324
>
>> Accept that he uses a Python script. I assume there is a Python
>> interpreter on the open live Suse CD. I don't see a command in the
>> script to envoke DD, it seems to just use commands that I guess are
>> native to Python to do the reads and writes.
>>
>> The owner of the Dell can't afford the repair or new PC at this point,
>> but the data is important to her son, who has games bought online with
>> the registration keys for those games somewhere within the interlaced
>> files in the RAID 0 array. So I may give this a shot.
>>

Yeah, that is basically the idea I was suggesting. To "de-interleave" the
two disks, and copy the data to a new larger target disk. I've never used
Python, and like you, I assume there is some language feature for accessing
raw blocks of data. I was thinking more along the lines of some other
scripting language, where I'd use a sequence of "dd" commands, alternating
between the two source disks, to do the copy. In that script, the
"chunk" size is the stripe size, which you'd adjust and try, until
the output file system started making sense. Values of 64K or 128K
would be where I'd start, as I think they're popular.

Paul