RAID1 problem

[Yendred]

Folks,
I'm looking for guidance as to how best to go about recovering my data.
My C: drive is/was a 500MB RAID1 array using an Intel ICH9R RAID controller (SATA) housing Vista business-edition. The motherboard is an ASUS P5KR-based home-build.
Something or other corrupted the array during an installation of a lot of security updates via MS Vista update. The RAID was corrupted so using <ctrl-i> I coaxed it into repairing itself. This involved it deciding by itself to invalidate drive 0 and booting off drive 1, hoping to be able to rebuild using the Intel Matrix software.
Unfortunately now the registry is corrupt so Vista won't boot off C: and the Vista recovery software doesn't know where the HD drivers are...

That tale of woe out of the way, how would you suggest I try to recover my wedding photos from (either) drive? I can install all my software again, but there are a lot of camera RAW files and jpgs that are irreplacible. I'm sure you're familiar with this situation.

As an asside, the external HD enclosure was dropping out of the Vista list of HDs as I was making backups, suggesting that the external HD was flaking out too, so I have an enclosure of uncertain competency to play with too. I could install one of my sick HDs in it and hook it to my laptop if you think that would be my best option.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Do not reinstall Windows, or any software onto the drives (any of the drives) that contain data you plan to recover.

Best course of action


Get third hard drive.
Remove two half-mirrors from system (make sure you label drives and ports so that exact reconstruction is possible).
Install a third hard drive into the system and install Windows on it, and ZAR into that Windows installation.
Add one of the half-mirrors to the system. See if maybe the drive is immediately readable. If yes, end of story.
If no, try with a second half-mirror.
If no luck, then try running ZAR as described in http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unfromat.htmSecond best option, in case there is no third hard drive available

Get a spare desktop machine, to which you can directly attach a half-mirror drive. Try to avoid using an USB enclosure, especially the one of known-suspicious reliability. Then the same procedure as in 4, 5, 6 above applies.

If all else fails, use the laptop and the USB enclosure. However, if the enclosure "drops out" intermittently, I do not think any kind of recovery is possible using ZAR. Maybe this still worth a try if it is the external hard drive which is faulty, rather than the enclosure itself. Place one of the half-mirrors into USB enclosure and see what the laptop says about it.