Physical layout of striped RAID 0, ICH6 chipset

[idata]

I have a pair of hard drives taken from a machine with ICH6 chipset that had been configured using the motherboard's built-in RAID as a striped (RAID 0) array. The motherboard is dead. If I can learn how the data is striped across the pair of drives, there is a chance that I will be able to recover the data by building a target partition of the proper size and copying the data from each drive into the right spots on the new partition, buildling a single "normal" partition that would have a recognizable file system.

I'm aware that I'll have to do "raw" reading of the drives in order to get the data, and raw writes to the new partition that I build to hold the result. Sounds almost like a fun project!

However, I don't have any idea how the data is laid out on the two drives. Is it ...

- sectors 0 2 4 6 etc from drive 0, sectors 1 3 5 7 etc from drive 1

- sectors 0-7 from drive 0, 8-15 from drive 1, 16-23 from drive 0, 24-31 from drive 1, etc

- low 4 bits of each byte on drive 0, high 4 bits of each byte on drive 1

- something else

Not surprisingly, HP's retail support has no clue what the answer might be. Surely someone knows. If I could find out, I could attempt recovery of the data myself without paying some "data recovery" company a few $thousand to do what I could likely do myself with this bit of knowledge.

Any chance that someone knows the answer? Thanks very much,

[Mark_H_Intel]

Hi James,

I was not able to find the information about how the data is located on the drives. I am told that the answer is complicated, because other information is written to the drives in addition to your data files.

I am not an expert in this area, but I received this suggestion from more than one of my contacts. Put the drives into a working system If the drives are good and have not had anything done to them since the motherboard died, then the data should be accessible in another system with ICH6R, ICH7R, ICH8R, or ICH9R chipsets.

Make sure you do not initialize your old drives when you put them in another system. You should install them in a system that has already had the RAID initialized on another pair of drives.

I hope this helps.

Like I said, I am not an expert in this area, so I want to point out the legal http://www.intel.com/sites/corporate/termsofuse.htm# NoticDisc Notices and Disclosures as a disclaimer on my advice and any other advice from the community.