My brother "merge" two 80GB harddisk for me when he built my computer but now that the computer's dead, can I retrieve folders from each drive separately (remove the two harddisks and use them as external harddisk separately)? Or do I have to make an image of the whole drive first? If so, how do I do that? Thanks

Depends what you mean by merge. Was it a RAID array. If so what type. RAID 0 or RAID 1.

If it was RAID 0 then there is a very good chance your data is gone. If it was RAID 1 then the data can be recovered.

One way to know if it was RAID 0 or RAID 1 is how much storage space you had. If it was 80Gbs then it was RAID 1. If it was 160 Gbs it was RAID 0 and you are screwed.

Stuart

I checked the definition of RAID 0 and 1 on the internet, I think it's RAID ) (stripe set or striped volume that splits data evenly across two or more disks with no parity information for redundancy). Is there absolutely no way I can access the information now?

also, how do I access information if it was in RAID 1 format?

The only way you are going to be able to retrieve the data if it was RAID O is if you install the disks in a computer exactly the same as the one it came out of with exactly the same RAID controller installed with exactly the same configuration.

With RAID 0 you install one of the disk as a normal disk as both disks will have exactly the same information on them and you should be able to recover the data.

Although RAID has it uses, it only protects against hard disk failure. It doesn't protect against other hardware failures like the motherboard so you should still do backups.

Stuart