Data recovery for a partitioned RAID?

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Excrucian

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I've been tasked with salvaging data from an ancient Windows XP machine with a pair of hard drives which used to be joined in a RAID and separated into three partitions. The computer has been sitting, unplugged, in storage for about a year after suffering some kind of catastrophic failure which caused Windows to, in the words of the owner, “stop booting up,” so god knows what kind of deterioration it's suffered. Normally I'd be comfortable with recovering data from a hard drive, but I've never had to deal with something like this before, and it has me stumped. The files seem to be jumbled up like mismatched puzzle pieces: a single .mp3 contains three or four different songs, for example, and Word documents are like something out of a random text generator. I'm assuming this is because of the RAID, but I'm honestly out of my comfort zone here.

I'm looking for some good data recovery software to try to salvage something from these drives. Any recommendations?
 
If it is a raid 1 you can just treat one of the drives as a single normal hard drive. If it is a raid 0 the best bet is to run them off the controller that was in the system. If the computer is usable I'd throw another drive in it or boot off a live cd. See if you can read the info off those drives if it is a raid 0.
 
Unfortunately I have no idea what RAID level it was. It's not my computer, and the owner isn't especially tech-savvy. Why this person bought a RAID-enabled machine for small business purposes I'll never know, but I blame salespersons. Is there anything I can do without knowing the RAID level?

To clarify the OP, I pulled one of the drives and connected it to a functional computer via an external enclosure, then tried my old standby of File Scavenger to see if it could pick up anything. That's when I started seeing the jumbled files. Unfortunately FS doesn't do RAIDs very well as I've now discovered, and I have no idea what to use in its place if anything. I can pick up a second enclosure later today if necessary.
 
Excrucian said:
Unfortunately I have no idea what RAID level it was. It's not my computer, and the owner isn't especially tech-savvy. Why this person bought a RAID-enabled machine for small business purposes I'll never know, but I blame salespersons. Is there anything I can do without knowing the RAID level?

To clarify the OP, I pulled one of the drives and connected it to a functional computer via an external enclosure, then tried my old standby of File Scavenger to see if it could pick up anything. That's when I started seeing the jumbled files. Unfortunately FS doesn't do RAIDs very well as I've now discovered, and I have no idea what to use in its place if anything. I can pick up a second enclosure later today if necessary.
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If you don't know why a small business would use raid then you shouldn't be dealing with them. We have a bunch of small business systems running raid 1's for uptime on the workstations. Goes even further for systems in places that don't have servers and the system in question hosts files or an app. For servers you see a lot of raid 5 or 6.

Now a raid 0 I don't see use for in most cases. It can have purpose though on scratch disks for instance.

Look at http://www.runtime.org/ and their raid reconstructor software. Sounds like a raid 0 which I'd agree is generally bad.

In the future the best option is to boot the existing system if possible and look at the raid controller(be it a card or shitty built on the board) and check its config. For a raid 1 you generally are safe just pulling a single drive. For a raid 0,5, 6, or 10(the common ones) you really want to keep them with the controller if all possible. Either moving the controller to another machine or if it is just a fucked up windows(or linux, unix, etc) install throwing in another drive not on the controller and running the system off it. Then run the recovery off that system. Running a recovery software on a single drive off any raid other then a 1 can be dangerous if the software does anything that could be destructive.
 
Just FYI - it's entirely possible that different partitions used different types of RAID (ie, raid 0 for set of partitions, raid 1 for another).

"Raid Reconstructor" is pretty good at figuring out how the drives need to be set up.
 
Thanks, guys. I've gotten a hold of the original order form and it is in fact a RAID 0 over all partitions. Unfortunately the original computer is no longer useable, so I'm going to have to migrate these drives elsewhere.

I'm taking a look at Runtime's offerings now, and I'm certainly impressed. One question: why RAID Reconstructor over RAID Recovery? Reconstructor's description implies that if I actually want to copy the files over or salvage corrupted data - which is all we're after at this point, the drives themselves being long overdue for retirement - I'll also need one of their other products.
 
The purpose of raid reconstructor is to recovery the metadata for the array (drive order, stripe size, partition start and end blocks, etc)
 
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