Well, I'm a little better off... but not by much. Used Partition Magic to expand may partitions a bit (I leave empty space between each partition in case the pointers for the beginning and end of the partition flake out), which seemed to work until XP detected and error on my 75 Gig partition and proceeded to repair the drive without my permission (asks to proceed with a timer, then defaults to "Repair"). Apparently trashed some of my files, a rough guess being about 6 Gigs worth.

Came back to later find all the partitions have disappeared again.
Not good. Standard troubleshooting isn't making much sense, so I'm suspecting my IDE cable. Hrmm.

Well, it's amazing the difference a cable can make. After swapping out the IDE 100 cable and a minor correction to one file, everything seems to be running again. If only I had discovered this before the OS decided to "fix" my largest partition for me.

I wish my problem were that easy to fix...

You know, "RAID kills bugs dead"...I'm beginning to think it's lethal for IDE drives as well.

Fuck dudes. Fuck. I think I've lost it all. All my data. Everything except for the meager 30-disc backup I made. All because of the controller. There was never anything physically wrong with the drive as far as I can tell now. I don't know what I'm going to do. Even trying to extract data from the drives in a cleanroom environment will be impossible since it's smeared across all the drives. And I deleted the array records in a despirate last-ditch effort. You know how you feel right after someone really close to you dies? People call it shock. I've got that right now. I don't know what I'm going to do. My LIFE was on there. All my devel files, all my emails, all my settings and programs and 100GB of media... gone. Just like that.

Originally posted by Snover All my data. Everything except for the meager 30-disc backup I made. All because of the controller. There was never anything physically wrong with the drive as far as I can tell now. I don't know what I'm going to do.

I'm better off, but I'm in a similar position, it appears that my estimate of 6 gigs worth of files lost was far too conservative an estimate. I ran a CRC check on some on directory of zip files and found that out of 686 Zips, only 6 survived. Some of those were old floppy games that I rescued from floppies that were barely "alive" and are probably dead now.

I guess I should be more concerned about all the personal files that are impossible to replace as I never made backups of them as this partition was my "backup drive". One difference is that I NEVER should have let the OS attempt to "repair" the partition before actually finding the source of the problem.

Even trying to extract data from the drives in a cleanroom environment will be impossible since it's smeared across all the drives.

That's been my main fear of RAID.

You know how you feel right after someone really close to you dies? People call it shock. I've got that right now. I don't know what I'm going to do. My LIFE was on there. All my devel files, all my emails, all my settings and programs and 100GB of media... gone. Just like that.

Mine is somewhere between 6 and 58 gigs of data, but I know the feeling. Obviously it's not the same as somebody dying, but when you lose something that's not replaceable it has that same kind of sickening feeling attached to it.

Post from school. Made a new account because I don't want to read all the new posts here and have to respond to them. 😀

Anyway, for $1000, OnTrack can analyze my drive and tell me what they can recover, and for $8000 and up, they can recover it. This costs so much because their clients are all big corporations. How am I supposed to pay for this? I'm sending out a plea to the IT people I know to try to find someone there that can cut me a deal since I'm just a poor unemployed highschool student. They're based here in the Twin Cities (Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis).

There are tools for disastrous drive recovery that you could probably accomplish this yourself, but you would still be looking at hundreds of dollars.

If possible, you should get a replacement hard drive and preserve your corrupted drives until you've exhausted all possible options. Right now, the stress of wanting to get your data back "right now" isn't helping. This way, you can get back basic computer operation while perusing recovery options at your leisure.

If I had stopped and hooked up my second drive to my backup PC, then used that to archive my data instead of trying to "force" my PC to recognize my missing partitions, I wouldn't be in the process of attempting to ascertain the damage and manually attempt to recover numerous corrupted archives.

Unlikely. Most of the advanced data retrieval tools are made by OnTrack and they have their own propietary in-house system which, according to the person I talked to on the phone, and which I don't doubt (with Class 100 cleanrooms), they have spent millions of dollars on. If this was a regular IDE drive that would be one thing, but it is a RAID-5.

Originally posted by Snover@school If this was a regular IDE drive that would be one thing, but it is a RAID-5.

Unfortunately true. I would've though that, by now, they would've inserted RAID support into their recovery software. I must've forgotton that they have pretty much jettisoned the idea of consumer-level support (they still have "EasyRecovery", but all the other consumer-level programs have been sold off) and are concentrating almost soley on high-end business support.

I still think starting over with another drive while giving yourself time to explore all possible options is the best idea.

That's kinda what I'm doing with this laptop, heh
The problems I'm having are that there is no Unicode support in Win98 and I don't have enough RAM. (64MB)