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Can't Boot Into OS, Need Data!
Name: chadius333 Date: January 8, 2008 at 14:27:44 Pacific OS: Windows Server 2003 CPU/Ram: xeon, 4Gb Product: Dell PowerEdge 1950
Comment:
Hi, we had a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with two Maxtor 300Gb 15k scsi drives (raid 1) fail on us around two weeks ago. After working with Dell Enterprise Support for about a week, we had no luck. We are moving towards one of those VERY expensive data recovery places but I refuse to give up just yet. According to Dell, the failure was due to firmware updates that were never made. Most of the troubleshooting that was done involved trying to boot from cd, perc5 drivers, other misc driver disks and a bootable flash drive... nothing worked. When attempting a parallel install, it goes through the usual blue screen setup process but when the time comes to install windows, I get the message "no hard disks found" . If I reboot and press "ctrl-r" the drives show up in that menu, so it does sound like its probably just a driver issue, as far windows not seeing the drives. Does anyone have any ideas on how I might be able to access one of the drives? We have six PowerEdges, would it be possible to put one of the drives that won't load in the secondary slot of a working server and access them through explorer or something? The settings on our servers are NOT identical. Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers! -chad
Name: chadius333 Date: January 8, 2008 at 14:44:17 Pacific
Reply:
Also, if i try to boot up as normal, the computer freezes at the windows server 2003 screen.
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Response Number 2
Name: Michael J (by mjdamato) Date: January 8, 2008 at 14:56:54 Pacific
Reply:
As long as you are not trying to boot with one of those drives on another computer you should be able to connect then as a 2ndary drive and copy off any data.
Michael J
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Response Number 3
Name: chadius333 Date: January 8, 2008 at 15:11:54 Pacific
Reply:
Thanks for the advice! I'll give it a whirl and post the results. -chad
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Response Number 4
Name: jefro Date: January 8, 2008 at 15:12:49 Pacific
Reply:
knoppix cd
I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.
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Response Number 5
Name: chadius333 Date: January 8, 2008 at 15:26:07 Pacific
Reply:
Interesting, do you think Linux will recognize the Windows file system?
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Response Number 6
Name: LinuxOS2 Date: January 8, 2008 at 17:09:24 Pacific
Name: lwcomputing Date: January 9, 2008 at 07:06:14 Pacific
Reply:
Knoppix should work just fine PROVIDED the drives are not Dynamic partitions and ARE basic partitions.
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Response Number 8
Name: chadius333 Date: January 15, 2008 at 13:24:55 Pacific
Reply:
Wow! Knoppix did the trick! The only issue I ran into was Linux not supporting NTFS but I just created lots of fat32 partitions on an external drive and transferred what I needed. Many, many thanks!!!
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Terminal Server or Citrix...
