chaotika

Setup:
2 Western Digital 100 GB PATA drives in RAID0 on a Promise controller
Windows XP

Here's what I think happened:

1) Ribbon cable goes bad on one drive
2) BSOD, reboot
3) Controller throws RAID error
4) I attempt to rebuild the array, possibly changing the stripe size
5) Reboot
6) Unpredictable behavior from the drive, disappearing, etc. I finally replaced the data cable
7) Reboot
8) during the next boot, CHKDSK ran automatically and destroyed the drive's directory structure, moved everything into a series of dir####.chk folders, and then deleted everything.
9) The hardware is working perfectly now, but the data is destroyed.

Since then, I believe I have avoided writing to the drives, so the surface data should be unchanged. Depending on how CHKDSK works, the surface data (not the MFT) may be largely unchanged from the original RAID configuration.

I've used GetDataBack to recover files from the drive, but anything over about 60K is completely corrupted. Some image files show visible evidence of interleaving. I have Runtime RAID Reconstructor, but I don't have a drive yet large enough to take the image, though it's the next thing I plan to try.

The data isn't worth the cost of a data-recovery service, but some of it is quite irreplaceable.

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jon