Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.

So I have a 5 bay hot swap SATA enclosure that's connected to a Silicon Image-based SATA adapter in a computer. It's running XP Pro. There are two 1.5TB hard drives in slots 1 and 2 respectively, set up using RAID 1 using the the Silicon Image utility. There are also two 1TB drives in bays 3 and 4, also set to RAID 1 the same way. The partitions for both RAID arrays are Dynamic partitions.

A few days back, there was a bare hard drive that needed some files copied off of, so it was popped it in bay 5, that bay to pass-through, and the copied data off of it. Later, I noticed that my 1.5TB drives no longer showed up in windows. In the Silicon Image utility, the drives showed up fine, no error. However, in Device Manager, it shows the RAID 1 array as uninitialized. It shows up as the right size, etc., but nothing else.

There's no sign of anything wrong with either drive, so I'm not sure what happened exactly. I'm not the only one who has access to that computer, so it is possible there is something else done to it that I don't know of. There's quite a lot of data on it still, and if at all possible, I'd prefer to not send it to Ontrack.

Does anyone know of software that would restore the partitions, keeping in mind that it's a Windows LDM partition? I have access to a variety of Operating Systems, so something that would work on Mac, Windows or Linux would be acceptable. The programs I usually use are not compatible with LDM.

share|improve this question

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

my 2 favorite programs for emergencies like this:

Partition Table Doctor

WinHex

neither one is free but they're well worth the money (and cheaper than Ontrack :)

share|improve this answer

I suggest these:

  1. Handy Recovery
  2. Free Data Recovery
  3. Data Recovery Software
share|improve this answer

protected by Gnoupi Aug 31 '10 at 9:23

This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.