HighPoint HPT374 Raid Help

[dejianr]

I hope this is the right area for some help/information. I have an ABIT IT7-Max2 V2 motherboard. It came with a Raid controller that was a HighPoint HPT374. Motherboard got fried. Tried a replacement, super hard to find, that
is not working. Can't find another.
Got 2 months behind on a project and didn't do backups. 3 projects going at once and ran outta of time. So now I'd like to get the data off the drives if possible. Stupid yea I know. Sometimes work is just too busy.
Will be building a new system over the next several weeks. Sharing my wife's PC for now.

Any ideas suggestions, etc would be appreciated. Right now I do need to focus on a new box. Then hopefully
I can recover the data.
Thanks Rich

 

[Mondoman]

A different MB that also uses an HPT374 should be able to recognize your array and allow you to copy off it (although probably not boot properly from the RAID array, since you would have to reinstall the OS for the new MB hardware). I'd get one, then boot off the CD drive. You should be able to copy off the RAID array then.
Don't forget to buy an extra copy of the MB (or RAID controller card) for your new system!

 

[chookman]

What RAID system were you using? If it was RAID-1 you should just be able to plug in one drive and retrieve the data. Otherwise Mondoman has the right idea.

 

[jitpublisher]

Yyou will have to go into the RAID BIOS on the board and let the BIOS know what drives and how they were configured. If it's not messed up too bad, the controller will be able find and re-establish the array.

 

[dejianr]

Thanks for all the comments. I had to give my wife's PC back to her. So I could not get back in yesterday. The reason I picked up the second IT7-MAX2 board
was just to copy off the data in the RAID-0 (zero) setup. But the board will not
boot into BIOS at all. I have PSU connected and nothing else. I receive no BEEPS and an Award BIOS Code of FF. Took all the memory out and tried to
boot, no beep. Took memory and video out, no Beep, NO BIOS.

Since I can't seem to find another MAX2 board to use. I wanted to see if there was a HighPoint board I could pick up for my next build and copy the data off that way. I am only off by 4 weeks. I was very good a B/Us. Deadlines for tight and it slipped.

As far as GHost is concerned, I assumed I would need a hardware open and
software option to copy the data. Need something to plug the drives into.

I thought about HighPoint. Figured I would look around in forums for ideas since more seems to come from the people then the companies in this day and age. Customer Service is dead in the USA today. But I will certainly give them a chance.

Had problems with 1and1.com as a hosting site. I'd rather have a screen door in the bottom of a boat then use them. At least the screen door would stop some of the water coming in. 1and1.com support team just opens the door and lets all the water in then say DUH !!!!! What happened.

Had problems with RCN.COM my ISP. Support there wouldn't open the door they would just watch the water come in and tell you there is no problem.

Had problems with Symantec and had to go to the Better Business Bureau to get it solved.

Last, would any HighPoint Raid controller be able to read the drives. Or does it have to be an HPT374 controller. I found a RocketRaid 404 for a decent price. If that would read and copy then I would go that type of way. I could not find in the specs where it mentioned any controllers. So I wasn't sure it would work. Was hoping some one else had a problem and resolved it that way.

 

[Mondoman]

The more closely related the RAID chipset, the better the chance that it will read the RAID array without issues.

 

[dejianr]

I thought I'd come back and supply an update to all the helped me out or tried to help me out.
First up. Highpoint support is worthless. I have set 3 emails over the last 3 weeks. In each email
I asked for help in finding a board that would communicate with the drives. I guess they are
making so much money they don't need me to purchase one of their boards. I have not heard a
peep from them. Funny all you ask for is advise and they won't even do that. What is American
Support becoming [yes I contacted CA].

I also found a shop on the Web Gillware.com/RAID_Help they can get the data off the drives.
A person named Gillware formed the company to help people and businesses recover raid data.
Mostly individuals. They quoted me a Price of 750 bucks if they use their drives. If I supply
a drive then its 700 bucks. Not quite what I was looking for. 40 - 50 - 60 bucks maybe.

The ABIT Board from BuyServerParts.com in FLA does not boot. He swears that both boards
he sent work in his machine. Neither boots to BIOS for me. I have the 20 pin and 4 pin connectors.
The front side power on and a Video card [2 diff ones]. Neither board will boot to BIOS. I gave
up on him.

I found a Rocket Board on EBAY. Goes off tomorrow for 15bucks with shipping. I will
try that.

New build of Intel 8500 Dual Core on a Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R with 2 gig of Corsair
memory is comleted. I hooked up the old IDE internal backup drive from the old. So I
am starting to rebuild what I can from that. If the Rocket Board works I will be in a
lot better shape.

Thanks for everyone help.

 

[pimpachu]

Sorry about posting like 6months after the fact- I Just found your post while searching for information about its chipset (future mod idea for my RocketRaid 1640).
If the above doesn't work, You also have the option of using a rocketraid 1640, 1740 and 1742 cards (all three use the same raid assembly method as your ide version), if you add in some sata/ide converters. I hope that helps- sorry about not being helpful, maybe someone else can benefit from this knowledge?

 

[dejianr]

Hi pimpachu,

Not sure if they would have helped or not. Everything I tried could access the disk but nothing
could read the data. So I was lost and had to rebuild my world from scratch. Accomplished for
the most part. Yes there was some minor stuff lost. Nothing big but sometimes the little stuff
means more. Funny one though, lost an email address of a long lost relative for family tree
information. My son found her and facebook and we are aquiring that information.

 

[pimpachu]

I'm glad to hear that you got most of your data back. Sad about the lost bits. I had a similar situation happen to me a few years back (10 years+). I was running win3.1 and needed to do a reformatting, due to a bad file table/ boot record, for the primary partition. I did everything I could to make sure that my important data files were going to be retrievable after the reformatting. I only had that one hard drive at the time (I was a kid), so my options were limited to floppies - ouch.
I used a file separator and a compressor ( drivspace + winrar- or something like it) to get some of my most precious data backed up, and used a partition recovery file sort of thing to allow me to recover my secondary partition after all was said and done.
Sigh. Through all my planning and careful work, I couldn't recover my data after reformatting the primary partition. I couldn't recover the secondary partition because, even though I had the partition data, I couldn't mount it without destroying its contents because it was a compressed partition and drive space couldn't mount it without formatting. To top it all off, I couldn't get the data off all my floppies to reassemble them. I forgot the reason; it installed an older version of drivespace than the one I used to back up my data (not sure how that happened). So I was essentially screwed until I could the right drvspace installed. I fortunately got a copy of win95 a few months later (xp came out and someone I knew gave me her old win95 disk) which had the right version of drivespace on it. But the utility I used to spread my data across disks wasn't win95 compatible! - at that time.
I ended up keeping those floppies and hard drive sections intact for a number of years afterwards, in case some way for me to recover the data came up.
Microsoft finally released a hardware visualization utility to all winXP users. I used this to install a copy of windows 95 on my xp machine. After getting all the programs working in windows 95, I plugged in my old data... CORRUPTED! Almost all of it! I could recover a few wallpaper images, but nothing really wanted.
I'm a little older and a little wiser than I was when I first backed up the data. Looking back, there was really only one piece of data that I really wanted; a cute little song I found on the internet, when I was young (and so was the internet).
Throughout the years I've done numerous searches on the few lyrics to the song I could remember. About a month ago, I refound it using dogpile.
All in all, I got what I wanted the most- that song. song name= "Ballad of O old cap'n bob" artist "Alex Wilson" website "AlexWilson.com".
It's not a great song, but it brought back memories, and it felt good to finally get it back. Visit the site to hear what I'm talking about.