Windows bootable?

[neqsohthree]

SO. Here's the story.

I had a 4 drive, 750GB RAID-0 setup. (yeeaaahhh i know. my bad on RAID-0.) While I was shutting down last week, the power cut. One of the drives had an error.

I took the system to a data recovery guy. They were able to recover the data. However, when I went to pick up the recovered data, they said that the data totalled 1.5 GB. He claimed that deleted data was being restored due to the recovery process. How my data doubled, I don't quite understand.

So, I am here to ask...

If I were to either a) replace the malfunctioning disk and re-raid the setup, b) buy a new standard drive, or c) simply boot from the external with all the recovered data...

WILL i be able to boot windows from the recovered data in any of those cases? Or will I have to do a fresh install? I did a complicated upgrade from Vista32 to win7-64, and i don't have a disk to work from.

Appreciate any help!

 

[gbhall]

I don't know how you set up your RAID 0. If for performance alone, there is no redundancy - data is striped on the several drives. See here http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel0-c.html and here http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/ If the broken drive is still perfect, you could use all four as RAID 10. which, of course, would have prevented the problem in the first place.

In no case can you recover from the remaining drive without a backup. Your best solution might be to break the RAID, Reinstall the OS on the remaining 3 good drives as RAID 5 , attach the rebuilt drive as a spare drive and recover what you can, which might be nothing in the case of a standard striped drive, which only contains half (or less) of the original data.

Deleted data would be recovered when a low-level recovery program was used. It is not clear what your recovery process left you with. It might all be working again, just with extra (previously deleted) data. If all the data has been recovered to just one drive, you could mount that in a second PC, or even the first after a rebuild of the OS, and access it there (after a backup though).