John Ryan

If your PC refused to boot and you got an error that said:
    RAID Volumes
    None Defined
or looked similar to the image below, then your not alone seems to be a common problem on the interweb that I have never found a good answer to... so here's what i had to do to get my data back using a Windows 7 PC.


First off, this post assumes that both your hard drives have not suffered any serious mechanical failure and that most of the data is accessible (like if the master boot record of the drives got corrupted)

NOTE: when working with damaged drives it's really important to use the drive as little as possible as you don't want to degrade the data any further.

Here's a summary of what i did:

- Connect each drive to another PCs motherboard (or boot same PC with a ramdisk like WinPE)
- Image both Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)
- Destripe (Reconstruct) the Raid into a single image
- Use a data recovery tool to analyse and extract data.


Here's that in a bit more detail;

1.Connect the damaged drive to another PCs motherboard
In order to salvage the data from the damaged drives I needed to connect them to another PC. This proved a little trickier than i first imagined. I normally use a SATA/USB adapter to connect loose hard drives to my PC, however, for some reason I couldn't get it to mount (i even tried in Ubuntu as it has a utility called dd to image HDDs). Eventually I attached the HDD to my PCs motherboard. Easiest way to do this is to take the SATA connector from your DVD drive and plug it into the hdd, this will save you having to open your BIOS to add a new drive. You will also need power, so find a spare power line and hook it up.

Once your connected, boot to Windows. You won't see the drive in explorer, but if you open "Disk Management" utility in "Computer Management" you'll see it.


2. Get an image of the affected drives.
For this i used a free tool called ReclaiMe. It's very easy to use and comes with a lot of instructions which i wont go into here. But whatever too you use at the end you should have a .img file sitting on you hard drive that is a complete copy of the drive you want to recover.

Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the second raid drive.

And yes, you guessed it. You'll need a lot of free space on your PC to get these images.

3. Destripe (Reconstruct) the RAID into a single drive image.
Once you have both drives imaged, you must then merge them together to get a single image. This is effectively making the drive not RAID any more in the hope that basic file recovery tools will be able to analyse the image. Again i used the free tool ReclaiMe. There is an option to open image files and reconstruct them... which is nice. This takes hours.... and hours. But worth it in the end if you get your data back.

4. Use a data recovery tool to analyse and extract data
Once the drive is imaged, your at the stage of using a file recovery tool to get your data back. I use GetDataBackForNtfs. There is a free version of the tool that will do the analysis to see if you can retrieve the data so i recommend that you do this first.
Once you have followed their instructions on using the tool, you should be able to rebuild the index (can take 6-8 hours) and eventually copy the files found from the image to another backup drive.

I hope this post helps. Let me know if you come across any difficulties or a better way of doing it.