Help with saving data

[Guest]

Please bear with me as I have about 1 hour of experience with using Kubuntu!

I have a Dell PC with a RAID 0 array consisting of (2) 250 Gb hard drives. Yesterday it indicated one of the drives was failing and recommended a backup, shortly afterwards the machine stopped booting up before I had the chance to back anything up. I believe it is a SoftRAID setup but am unsure how to confirm this.

To access the drives I am trying to boot from a live Kubuntu 8.04 CD to move data to an external drive. I can mount and access the external drive and a USB drive, but cannot figure out how to access the internal HDs where my data resides.

Using the System Settings/Advanced tab/Disk & Filesystems I see a list of drives including the USB drive, the external HD, and two drives that look like the internal HDs.

Opening one of the internal HDs I see three partitions labelled /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3. I can mount SDA1 with a VFAT filetype but cannot seem to get SDA2 or SDA3 mounted so I can access the drives.

Any help would be appreciated!

[HavocXphere]

Re: Help with saving data

Hate to be the bearer of bad news....

"Striped set without parity" or "Striping". Provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Any disk failure destroys the array, which becomes more likely with more disks in the array. A single disk failure destroys the entire array because when data is written to a RAID 0 drive, the data is broken into fragments.

In laymans terms that mean that unless you can revive the dead disk, all the data is gone. You can't mount only the one remaining disk and see anything, because half a raid 0 array means you've got only half of each file...ie nothing.

You *might* be able to get your data back if the "right" thing is broken. e.g. the HDD circuitry.

Sorry. You could try sending it in for data recovery...but its going to be mad expensive since its RAID'd. I'd say cut your losses and right it off as a learning the hard way experience.