treas0n

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Dec 16, 2009
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I have a windows vista box. My HDD that ran the OS has just failed. The problem is I had 2 500gb HDD's spanned together into one 1tb drive. I am worried that if I replace the failed HDD and reinstall Vista, windows setup will not detect the spanned hard drive and I will lose all of my data. Is there any way to either get the data off of the spanned drives via a USB external HDD encloser or ensure that my new windows install will detect the spanned drive?

I may upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 once I get the new drive.

Thanks for the advice.
 

gtvr

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Jun 13, 2009
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I'm fairly certain you can only do that with some kind of data recovery tool. Did a quick google search and found a few (for example http://www.easeus.com/resource/dynamic-disk-recovery.htm) - no endorsement of that, never used it, but it does have some explanation info about windows dynamic volumes on the page.
 

treas0n

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Dec 16, 2009
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Thanks for the link... I'm still stumped as to whether the spanned drive information is stored with the OS or not. If it's not, then in theory I can pull out both spanned drives and put them in another computer and windows will see them as one drive but somehow I doubt that it will work that way. Anyone have any idea?