Mount a Windows RAID 1 disk in Ubuntu 12.04?

[LiveDie]

I have been running Windows XP64 on a RAID 1 drive for several years (installed when Vista was new). At some point in the past two years, I started getting blue screens occasionally, which I chalked up to driver issues, that would not be resolved given my OS. Lately, the blue screens have become more frequent.

Last weekend, I got a 1.5 TB USB drive to back everything up. When I started the large copy, didn't make it very far before BSOD. Tried again and again, didn't work. Now, the drive won't boot, and Windows Setup CD is no help to repair the installation (Automated REcovery disk is missing, and no help without floppy drive). After more consideration (and probably should have thought of it sooner), the problem was one bad memory stick. Swapped a few around, and computer has been up and running for many hours with Ubuntu 12.04 on the USB drive.

So, now I have a functioning computer, and a RAID 1 disk I can't mount. When I have the RAID feature turned on in the BIOS (Asus M3-A32MVP, BIOS 2202), the disk doesn;t show up under the SATA II controller. However, when I set the BIOS to IDE, both hard drives show up under the controller. But I cannot figure out how to mount one to be able to copy the files over. If I can accomplish that, I can reinstall Windows and should be able to handle it from there.

Thanks, LiveDie

[saikee]

Two steps.

(1) Hardware detection - The Linux has to detect the your hard disk successfully at the hardware level (same as seeing it in Device Manager in a MS Windows). You do this by clicking a terminal in Ubuntu and issue this command.

sudo fdisk -l

the command will list every hard disk and every partition the kernel has found from your system even if they are not mountable. If the disk is not seen in the list then hardware wise Linux did not find it.

(2) Manula mounting a partition - You can click the a MS Windows partition if you can see it on the desktop for a Ubuntu. However you can always manually mount a partition in any Linux. Say it is device /dev/sdb1 you want to mount the commonds in a Ubuntu terminal are

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/here
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/here

Basically you create a mounting point in the /mnt directory and mount the hardware device on it. Linux kernel is intelligent enough to find out the filing system normally without assistance. A partition can be mounted manually in any Linux if it is "healthy".

LInux has abetter change for you to recover the data because if a system file get corrupted your MS Windows won't boot and you get a BSOD. However Linux doesn't use any of the Windows system files so it can still read/write the rest of the filing system perfectly to enable recovery.

If your partition has corrupted files it will have trouble in mounting it. If the problem is severe the disk is no longer readable and will not appear in the hardware level then.

Hope this helps.