Bad Beat

Here follows a tale of the dumb. The names haven't been changed to protect the idiotic. Since the moron is yours truly, I think I have my okay.

A while back my C: drive died. This was upsetting, but luckily I was able to get most of the data recovered. I then set up a mirrored RAID array to protect against future problems. While doing this I decided to set up a striped RAID array as a D: drive.

It took some doing (faulty SATA cable is a tough problem to track down it seems), but I got it all working smoothly.

Yesterday I bought a whack of upgrades for my system. Essentially a new system. This required me picking up a few SATA drives to replace my IDE RAID.

I mistakingly thought my C: drive (mirrored) was the IDE, and the D: the SATA. Needing to backup my D: drive so I could copy data after rebuilding the array, I decided to disconnect one of the mirrored RAID drives to use it for backup purposes.

So I unplugged one of the IDE drives and restarted.

Oops.

My D: RAID was now faulty (obviously). So I turned off the machine, plugged the drive back in, and unplugged one of the SATA drives.

Back on, C: drive now faulty, fine. In my effort to get it to boot of the (perfectly fine) single drive (as it should do), I accidentally started "repairing" the array by copying the source data to the UNREPAIRED IDE drive. I threw the switch quickly, but not before 1% of the data was copied. I'm going to guess the header data used to identify the drive got overwritten too.

SHIT!

So now, no D: drive. No pictures. No downloaded drivers, apps, games, etc. (the installed versions of all thee are fine on the C: drive), and no PORN! WTF?

Actually, the pictures are what bugs me the most. Iceland, The Queen Charlotte Islands, Israel, parties, games, and everything else I've taken a picture of over the last however many months its been. Most of the Iceland pics are at also at my folks luckily (however, none of the RAW format ones), as are the Queen Charlottes. Israel is on Flickr, but only about half of the pictures I took.

So now I begin my quest to see if I can recover the data and rebuild the RAID. The data should still PHYSICALLY be there... anybody know any good RAID 0 recovery tools?

Bah.