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From: E on 17 May 2010 12:18

>
> So either find a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset and
> RAID drivers in place, or "become good at coding dd into a
> script" :-)
>

Wish I would have did some more research before attempting this. I maybe
should have just bit the bullet and bought a Dell replacement
motherboard. They said they had one for over $400.

Everything would have been so much easier for me then. The front panel
connectors, lights, and switches on a Dell are bad enough, especially
the USB/audio jack board that has a proprietary interface to connect to
the main board via ribbon cable, and then the power switch/LEDs that in
turn connect to it with a ribbon cable. I know it's possible, but I
don't have the patience to experiment at this point.

I am familiar with DD, but have never used it. I know it comes in handy
for imaging drives. If I could pull it off it would be a feat, but I'm
not ready to experiment with someone else's data.

Thanks again Paul
Eddie

From: Christopher Muto on 17 May 2010 12:55
E wrote:
>
>>
>> So either find a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset and
>> RAID drivers in place, or "become good at coding dd into a
>> script" :-)
>>
>
> Wish I would have did some more research before attempting this. I maybe
> should have just bit the bullet and bought a Dell replacement
> motherboard. They said they had one for over $400.
>
> Everything would have been so much easier for me then. The front panel
> connectors, lights, and switches on a Dell are bad enough, especially
> the USB/audio jack board that has a proprietary interface to connect to
> the main board via ribbon cable, and then the power switch/LEDs that in
> turn connect to it with a ribbon cable. I know it's possible, but I
> don't have the patience to experiment at this point.
>
> I am familiar with DD, but have never used it. I know it comes in handy
> for imaging drives. If I could pull it off it would be a feat, but I'm
> not ready to experiment with someone else's data.
>
> Thanks again Paul
> Eddie
>

this reply to alt.pc-clone.dell only.

there is a xps-600 motherboard on ebay with a staring price of $100 and
no bids. ends in about 10 hours. check if the part number matches your
old board. if they have not been corrupted from the efforts you have
made, this is probably your best bet at gaining access to your drives
again. good luck.

From: William R. Walsh on 17 May 2010 13:24
Hi!

> I'm working on a Dell XPS-600 with a failed motherboard. The PC had
> two 160GB drives that I assume were set up in a RAID 0 configuration
> since it was a gaming PC. I hooked them to a new motherboard

That's not likely to work for a few different reasons:

1. You're dealing with fakeraid (more on this in a bit).
2. You're trying to set the drives up on a different motherboard. Is
the chipset exactly identical to the one from the Dell system?
3. RAID0 has absolutely NO fault tolerance. A good way to put it is
"the 0 stands for exactly how much data you will get back if something
goes wrong".

First, the explanation of "fakeraid"...fakeraid is any RAID system
that uses off the shelf disk controller hardware and some trickery in
an add-on BIOS or device driver to put the disks attached to the
controller in an "array". The controller has no knowledge of RAID nor
does it have any RAID logic whatsoever. All of this is done in
software. This software can be quirky to say the least.

Good hardware ("realraid") RAID controllers have a way for you to
download their configuration and store it. Should a controller failure
occur, the disks can be connected to another, exactly identical
controller and the configuration restored. I have never seen any
fakeraid solution that offers this capability.

Whether real or fake, all RAID methodologies are to some extent
proprietary. No two are likely to work the same way with regard to how
the disks are configured.

In spite of all this, there might be a faint chance that you could get
things going again...if you can use exactly the same chipset
(preferably even the same kind of system) that was used in the Dell
machine, and if you can set the array up *exactly* as it would have
been configured the first time. If you do get it to work, don't depend
upon it--get the data off of there and make a new array. Otherwise
you're just asking for a very unpleasant surprise one day.

If nothing else, assuming both disks are good, you could try to
reconstruct them with some sort of "disk editor" utility and a little
time spent figuring out the stripe size, as well as how to paste the
data back together.

William
From: Paul on 17 May 2010 13:37
E wrote:
>
>>
>> So either find a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset and
>> RAID drivers in place, or "become good at coding dd into a
>> script" :-)
>>
>
> Wish I would have did some more research before attempting this. I maybe
> should have just bit the bullet and bought a Dell replacement
> motherboard. They said they had one for over $400.
>
> Everything would have been so much easier for me then. The front panel
> connectors, lights, and switches on a Dell are bad enough, especially
> the USB/audio jack board that has a proprietary interface to connect to
> the main board via ribbon cable, and then the power switch/LEDs that in
> turn connect to it with a ribbon cable. I know it's possible, but I
> don't have the patience to experiment at this point.
>
> I am familiar with DD, but have never used it. I know it comes in handy
> for imaging drives. If I could pull it off it would be a feat, but I'm
> not ready to experiment with someone else's data.
>
> Thanks again Paul
> Eddie
>

If you're copying the RAID0 array, to a separate spare disk, there is
no danger to the user's data. As long as you're not *writing* to the
original disks...

If done correctly, tools like chkdsk would indicate all is well, while
if the copy is done with the wrong stripe value, it'll be gibberish.
And you'll be testing the copy of the data for consistency, rather
than the original data.

If you use a tool like HDTune from hdtune.com, you can scan for bad blocks,
and as long as the bad block scan on each disk is clean, then there is
little to fear while making the copy. If the disks were damaged, then
we're talking more of a "data recovery" problem, rather than a pure
"data copy" problem.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

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.

Paul
From: E on 20 May 2010 00:38
Christopher Muto wrote:
> E wrote:

>>
>
> this reply to alt.pc-clone.dell only.
>
> there is a xps-600 motherboard on ebay with a staring price of $100 and
> no bids. ends in about 10 hours. check if the part number matches your
> old board. if they have not been corrupted from the efforts you have
> made, this is probably your best bet at gaining access to your drives
> again. good luck.
>

Do you think I could use a board out of a different Dell machine (that
fits of course), and use the existing Windows license?

I may have found a solution to getting data from the RAID array with out
getting a motherboard with the same RAID controller.


Thanks for the eBay suggestion. I should check there every once and a while.

Eddie
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