Meltdown recovery and data access help needed

[rfrank44]

Hi,

I have two questions. Both stem from a PS & motherboard meltdown just before Christmas. The board was a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 with an nforce4 chipset and RAID controller. I had it set up for RAID 1 and I was running Windows XP Pro with all the latest upgrades and service packs. I still don't know how extensive the damage is because the PS and motherboard are both fried, but I'm hoping that other components are okay. I want to do as easy a rebuild as possible since the GA-M55SLI-S4 is perfectly fine for my needs. Unfortunately the GA-M55SLI-S4 has been discontinued and is not available anywhere, neither is the GA-M57SLI-S4. However, I did find an ASUS M2N-SLI Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 560 board which brings me to my first question: Assuming all components are working properly, will I find myself looking at a fairly easy build with this board? By "easy" I mean will Windows Repair do the trick, including the RAID controller, or will I be forced to do a clean install?

My second question has to do with a more urgent need. While I wait for my new motherboard, I need to get an excel file off one of the drives that was attached to the Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4. (I'd also like to know if these drives are okay.) I have another older PC at home - I'm using it right now. How do I get a look at the drive to copy that excel file given that it has a copy of the OS installed on it? Is there a relatively uncomplicated way to do that?

I very much appreciate any suggestions, support, or information.

Regards,
richard

 

[Amg]

oh god on a raid ?


changes are it will wipe them clean hwen you try and add the drives to the raid like my raid likes doing >.> on a raid both HDDs are used to store the same files :/ unless on reliblity mode so yeah I think you lost that file...Gigabyte don't do any SLI part form one and thats a 750i chipset


how old is the system?

if its really old than its best just to build new I m affired :|

 

[rfrank44]

RAID 1 is a mirror so the file is actually on two drives. The question is can I attach a drive that has an active partition and operating system to an existing system to retrieve data? Will the operating system create a conflict or will the PC simply ignore any OS other than the one on the primary controller?

richard

 

[Amg]

I have a raid 0 I think, its for performace, the relibleity mode it is possbile to recover becasue it uses ISO if one HDD fails, if thats not the way it works I m going to say BTEC are rubbish>.< anyway back to the pointon performace mode the way I got it was that it uses both HDDs for the same thing pretty much, thats were it gets its performance from no bottlenecking on the mobo.

it might be possible to get the data off them when you get a new mobo as long as it don't ask to format the drives when you create your raid on the new mobo

note vista never asked for raid drivers for some reason when I made my comp, it was only OEM vista

however XP is different

 

[rfrank44]

I have been able to access the drive by using a SATA to USB transfer adapter. That allowed me to get to the data I needed in the short term and I should be able to save all of it if I decide not to set up RAID on the new machine. I think I will go that route since I have imaging software and an external hard drive. A mirror seems almost paranoid. If I forgo RAID, I can do a clean install on one drive and then move the data back over from the other.

richard