BTW, Windows XP doesn't allow software RAID-1 in the OS. You need some sort of hardware or "hardware" RAID controller to do it. I don't know if the Precision he ordered has such as controller (you can configure with or without from Dell), but it's yet another MS annoyance. That could be the explanation for not getting the RAID-1 he asked for.
Andrew Baudouin wrote: > All, > > Last night I was helping a friend with his PC. He is a self-employed > IT consultant and is exclusively a Windows dood. Some background: > > He buys just about exclusively from Dell. I have tried to get him to > purchase AMD but I don't think any big box vendors allow financing on > AMD Opteron workstations (At least, SUN doesn't and we couldn't find > any suitable machines from HP's site at the time of the purchase). > His PC is a Precision workstation featuring dual Xeon processors , 2GB > of RAM and a supposed Raid-1 160GB SATA array. > A few days ago his primary hard disk crashed (MAXTOR = SHIT). No > worries, he thought, just boot off of the second mirrored drive and > get a RMA back from Dell. He reboots only to find that Dell failed to > set up the mirrored drive and the second drive was only sitting out > there unused. He reinstalls Windows on the second good disk and > attempts to read the data off of the bad one, which just results in > infinite CHKDSK operations. He begins pondering the thousand+dollars > in data recovery costs (as a self-employed consultant, his data is > priceless) when I come to the rescue with a bootable Gentoo Linux > 2005.0 x86-64 disc. > > He brings his bad disk over to my house along with a second good disk > to copy the data onto ( I have nothing approaching 160 GB of free > space :) ) I am able to plug the bad disk into the onboard Nvidia > SATA contorller and immediately mount it and get a directory listing. > While this indeed looked promising, the lack of NTFS write support > meant I would have to create a VFAT filesystem on the second disk to > ensure that his new Windows installation could read the recovered > data. Using cfdisk and mkfs.vfat fails miserably with any kind of > passed partition size (bug in the 64-bit version of mkfs.vfat?), so I > am then forced to boot a Win98SE installation disk to create a 160GB > Fat32 partition. This takes about an hour to create and format, so we > go play some XBOX in the interim. > > To make a too-long story short, we were able to copy about 90% of the > data. We got some intermittent NTFS seek and sector errors, but every > 100% critical piece of data was salvaged despite the intermittent copy > errors while doing a cp -Rv. All of his recent wedding and honeymoon > pictures (he married a friend of me and my wife's from HS) were > salvaged. 80% of his project data was salvaged. > > Just goes to show that the best thing to do is be versatile. Some > tools are better for certain jobs, and in this case Linux and its > included NTFS ro-support is the best tool for the job. > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
