On Jul 19, 2005, at 5:16 PM, José Pedro Saraiva wrote:
Hi,
I know this isn't a gentoo related question so forgive me, but I trust
on the gentoo mailing list to give me a hand...
I have a Asus P4P800 motherboard that recently became useless (plain
broken, don't know why, no boot, no BIOS, nothing). I had 2x120 GB
SATA hard drives connected with RAID 0 using the intel ICH5R chipset
included in the board.
Is my data completely lost, now that the motherboard is broken? Is
there a way to recover it? If I install another motherboard with the
same RAID chipset will my data be recoverable or is it a lost cause?
Didn't make a backup, did you? That's OK, neither do I. ^_^U
First, see if the motherboard can be saved. If the BIOS is fried,
usually the boot block will kick in. Drop in a floppy drive
(optionally, an ISA video card as well; strangely, an AGP video card
worked with my LANParty's BIOS). Google your BIOS maker's name and
the words "boot block" for specific directions on what to put on a
floppy disk. Then, start your computer with the floppy in the A:
drive, and if the boot block survived (it's usually not updated when
flashing the BIOS), it'll automatically reflash itself from the
floppy and then restart, loading the new BIOS and hopefully saving
your ASCII. :-)
Hopefully your RAID BIOS (and CMOS) is a separate chip from the
system BIOS that shouldn't have been affected by the above ordeal.
If it isn't working, then read on.
If you remember your stripe size, then you should be able to plug
your drives into any ICH5R-based motherboard and get your data back.
Theoretically, you could plug your drives into any RAID whose BIOS
does not write to the disks when creating an array and then recreate
the array in the BIOS with the same stripe size. I don't know if
software RAID can rebuild your array, but that seems like your best
bet, lest you have a friend with a lot of SATA RAID controllers (s)
he's willing to lend out.
If all else fails and your data is priceless, grab a couple grand and
look into professional data recovery, because unless you can find a
super-geek, that will probably be your best bet.
--
Colin
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