Data Recovery Issues

ClearlyNotAGoomba

Alright, so here's the problem. I had an Alienware laptop (yeah, yeah, I know) that scorched itself to death, or so it seems. It had two laptop hard drives hooked together in a RAID 0. One or both of them may be dead, since the computer failed to start up at all in the later stages. It's absolutely necessary that I get the data off of them, since they basically have my entire body of work for the past two years on them.

My question to you, my G&T friends, is: What is the best way to get the data off of them? I took it to Best Buy, and they said they didn't have the equipment there, but could send it off to another facility that could charge up to $1500. Since they were happy to charge me $50 just to tell me this, I'm not so sure of their word. Is there anywhere that would be able to guarantee they could get the data off? If so, is it any cheaper?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

japan

If they are set up as RAID 0, and either of the drives is dead, the whole lot is toast. There is no redundancy in RAID 0.

If the drives still function, you'll need to find some way of getting both drives mounted as a RAID volume on another system. This would preferably use identical RAID hardware or software, because you're going to need to know exactly how the original volume was set up to even read the drives.

I'm honestly not certain if a data recovery place would be able to do much if either drive is unrecoverably dead, because even if they can read one half of the striped data, it's useless without the other half.

ClearlyNotAGoomba

Well I don't think they should be irrecoverably dead. If anything, they just have mechanical problems and the platters are still fine. How should I go about getting the information necessary to mount them again? What should I ask the company for?

Unknown

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