Be Excellent To Each Other

Main trouble is in getting XP installation to recognise drives at the correct size or even at all.

Finally manage to work out how to RAID a couple of drives but when I have them in RAID mode the XP installation can't find any drives.

If I don't have them in raid it can only see about 128 GB of the 250 each has. I've searched through the BIOS options and can't seem to find anything about large hard disk support. Any ideas as to what might be going wrong?

Like DavPaz asked in the last thread, what motherboard is it?
127GB is the limit of the (mumble mumble)-bit addressing system, so either your motherboard is ancient, or your drives are jumpered in some way (although I don't think I've seen any that jumper to 127GB?)

Hmm. Jumpers, hadn't thought of that. The motherboard is a very new one. Will AHCI have anything to do with anything?

I am too out of touch with hardware to know what AHCI is.
Having googled it, I can give a very firm "maybe"

What model of motherboard is it? Please tell us, this will make it much easier to be able help you.

It's this one:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143228/

During this upgrade I managed to lose a load of data from an important hard disk which I'd not backed up for ages. Hoping I can manage to get it recovered.

Ah, right.

Step 1, does your bios report the size of the drives correctly?
Step 2, looks like xp doesn't support 48-bit addressing until SP1. Are you installing from a vanilla XP cd? Can you create a slipstream one with SP3 on it?

Admittedly, this doesn't help your RAID problems.

Sorry, this isn't actually a response to your motherboard post. I'll take a look at that now and see if there's anything I can see.

Bios does report drive size correctly.

I wonder if 'evaluation' versions of Vista work okay these days. I might get hold of another copy of XP which is newer. The XP disc I have is very old.

Thing is I'm pretty sure I've used this disc before on large hard drives. Oh well who knows what's going off.

In that case, I would STOP EVERYTHING to do with the new system. You need a working PC, yours or a friends, take that hard disk there and see what recovery you can run from it. Anything more you do towards getting an OS on there is putting that data further at risk.

XP will in almost all cases need to be fed a driver floppy during the installation boot (when it says Press F6 To Add Third Party SCSI Drivers, which flashes by at the bottom during the white-on-blue 80x25 plain text bit) to see RAID drives done off the motherboard like this. That's probably why you can't see the RAID array during boot.

I have seen hard disks with a jumper labelled something like "127Gb Clip", which basically makes the drive's firmware pretend to be a 127Gb model. It's to stop old mobos that cannot understand bigger disks freaking out. However unless you changed that jumper specfically I wouldn't say it's likely to be this... lets concentrate on data recovery before we tackle reinstallation.

The data I lost was due to the drive receiving some physical damage somehow. I'm not entirely sure how it happened but the plastic above the pins for sata connection broke off and was left with bare pins. I tried soldering onto the bare pins from a sata cable but it doesn't show up in BIOS. Sounds like it spins up okay though when powered.

I'm trying to install to completely different hard disks than the one that is now invisible.

I'm not the best person to answer this as I've never tried to set up a RAID array in my life.

In the BIOS under integrated peripherals, you need to set SATA AHCI mode to AHCI (there's no RAID option here because of your motherboard model)
Then set Onboard Sata/IDE ctrl mode to RAID (that should be an option according to the manual).

Forget that, I'm stumped.
The manual tells you how to create a RAID array, but the first thing it says is set SATA RAID/AHCI mode to RAID. If you look back at the integrated peripherals section of the manual, it tells you that's not an option unless you've got the DS3R model of the motherboard even though the DS3 features on the website lists RAID as a feature.

Good find, Joans. It never even occured to me that he could be working from an original XP disk. Nirehenje, there's nothing wrong with borrowing a newer XP CD with Service Pack 3 pre-applied -- or getting it from the Pirate Bay for that matter -- if you are feeding it a legal serial number. You do need to get either the retail or OEM version of XP though, depending on what sort of key you have. I've seen an XP 8-in-1 and 12-in-1 version which puts all permuations (XP Home, XP Pro, Media Centre, Retail, OEM, Tablet, etc etc) onto one disc via some sort of black voodoo magic.

And yes, Vista installs work for (IIRC) 30 days with no serial number at all, if you want a testbed. You could also get an Ubuntu CD and boot that (from the CD, without installing it); rooting around on drives looking for data is straightforward in the Ubuntu GUI.

Ow, that's a real pain. How important is this data? I have a possible ninja solution.

That data was absolutely horribly important to me.

OK here goes then.

(An aside; a professional data recovery output would certainly be able to sort you out, but you won't get much change from £1000.)

On a hard drive you have the platters, heads, and coil on the inside connected, usually via a six-pin or so cable, to a controller board. The board doesn't actually connect to anything other than that, and the SATA/power connectors are attached to the control board. Furthermore, the board is usually swappable between hard drives of identical make, model, and capacity.

If you can source a drive that is a complete match for your one -- ebay will be your friend here -- it's the work of minutes to swap the broken board from your drive with the working board from the doner and hopefully creating a frankendrive with your data intact. Most importantly, you don't have very much to lose by giving this a try, as you can try removing the doner board (to see how feasible this is) before touching the drive with your data on. You don't need to do anything complicated to swap the boards, generally; just unscrew some screws that hold it on, unplug any connectors that run into the drive, and remove it gently. Then refit the new board.

Disclaimer: I've never done this, as I've never had cause to, but I have heard from various people who have pulled it off successfully. I can't attest this will work, but it might be worth a shot.

There's a company that do data recovery only about half a mile away and offer prices from £30 inc vat so I might check with them first.

Oh? Definitely worth getting a quote then. Everytime I've looked before it's been very very expensive for anything that involves physically mucking about with the drive, but perhaps as time has gone on it's become a less rare skill.

Again, people. Data not backed up is data you don't want. Learn from this!

Indeed I was very silly. Most data recovery peeps have a pretty success rate but it's usually a pretty expensive thing.

I had a problem with a 'large' maxtor drive (250GB) not being fully recognised in XP, I think it would only 'see' the first 120 or so.

The manufacturers website had a download that altered something that would make the rest usuable. It was called a big disk enabler (and possibly something about LBA, large base array or something).

In short - look on the support page for your drive model too. It's a quick thing to try.

make sure you're using NTFS formatting as well. FAT32 doesn't cope with big disks (message from 2002, brought to you by the letter H and the number 6)

They are very much being NTFS formatted but I can't only see 128GB when preparing to format/partition. I've searched the motherboard and the drives for any jumpers that would be appropriate but there's nothing I can see. Searched the manual and that won't help.

The drives I've been trying are maxtor funnily enough. Maybe that's the issue. Although I've another drive that isn't Maxtor that still only shows 128GB. I just don't know what's going off. I feel I should have gone for one of my original choice of boards rather than this complicated beast.

Bios does show them correct size though so it must be just something to do with XP.

Like I said before, you need at least SP1 to recognize disks bigger than 128GB. Are you installing from an original XP cd?
Your options are:
Install XP, then install SP1 (well, just install SP3) and then repartition your drives (although not the one you've installed windows on).
Download a dodgy copy of XP with SP3 integrated and use your (presumably legit ) Product Key.
Google for XP SP3 slipstream and follow the instructions to create your own SP3 cd.

Indeed. I now have an SP3 disc which has even recognised the RAID setup. Hurrah!

Now all that remains is to buy a power supply capable of supporting my new components and see if I can recover my lost data.

Am I reading it right that you've just RAIDed a drive that wasn't RAID before, and you're hoping to recover data off it?

I do hope not.

Oh nonononono, my dear Sheepeh. I'm not that silly. Silly enough to not back up my data and to have potentially lost it all from another hard drive but not silly enough to expect to retrieve data from messing about with RAIDing drives.

The drives were clean.

I'm looking forward to using a proper PC again instead of this stupid laptop.

EDIT: This edit is brought to you by my new PC.

Woo! So what's the data recovery plan?