Broke mirror, used disks individually, computer died, can't access disks in new comp.

[Fun Guy]

I am sending up a flare since I am at my wit's end and have no idea what to do at this point. 😱

In my prior computer I had two 1TB mirrored discs - discs which held all my data for nearly 20 years - but I ran out of room, so I broke the mirror and started using the discs individually (they had been fine for 5 years, so I thought I was good).

Well, that computer died (not disc related) so I bought a 4-disc enclosure and plugged those two drives in there. Imagine my surprise when the new computer could not see the discs, as they were dynamic. I found that one parameter of 42 needed to be changed to 07 and all would be good.

I downloaded HxD and changed that parameter, and this time, yes, the discs were 'active' and not 'dynamic', but now the file system was 'RAW' and showed 0 bytes of data. Frustrated at the prospect of losing all my data, I took some time off and got back to it this week.

After doing some reading, someone suggested trying something different, but in order to do so, I would have to change back that parameter from 07 to 42. Problem is, when I fire up HxD, the application does not see ANY of my hard drives.

Win7's Disk Manager sees all four discs, but HxD only sees only a CD (logical disc) in the optical drive (physical disc).

Can anyone help? Seems my solutions are creating more problems!?!?!? 🙁

 

[Ketchup]

Probably would be easiest just to restore from your backup and wipe the drives. How much of your data wasn't backed up? Yeah, dynamic volumes don't hold up outside of the original OS, which is why I don't see the point of them personally.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why didn't you just "Import" the dynamic disks, into the new OS. (They should have shown up as "Foreign".)

Dynamic discs maintain a mirror (on each disc!) of the overall OS disk configuration database.

You went about this all wrong, sorry to say.

 

[Fun Guy]

Not saying I didn't screw up, obviously I did. When I broke the mirror I presumed (incorrectly, as it turns out) that each disk was now independent, and could be seen, etc. from any other Win7 system. How was I to know this was not the case? None of the reading I did on the topic mentioned this.

The old system has been scrapped, so any potential solution requiring it won't happen.

And I did not back up, just mirrored the drives, because this was just data (no OS, applications, etc.).

 

[Fun Guy]

Anyone else have any ideas???

 

[Joepublic2]

I would have to change back that parameter from 07 to 42. Problem is, when I fire up HxD, the application does not see ANY of my hard drives.

That's weird. Hmm. You're running it as Administrator, right? I use HXD a lot and I've never had it fail to detect a drive if the windows disk managment console could see it. I would try a linux boot disk/thumb drive next IMO (and disconnect or disable if the firmware supports it all the drives that I'm not working on to make sure I didn't open the wrong device); there's a ton of excellent hex editors for linux and it's quite a bit smarter at detecting hardware than windows is.

I usually use http://linux.die.net/man/1/hexedit; its a console application included in most distros but it always seems to be able to open up raw block devices (/dev/sda,b,c etc.) which sometimes doesn't work for me with GUI editors like Bless etc. Bless, wxhexeditor etc. are definitely easier to use, though. Make sure to run them as root or sudo depending on which distro you use.

edit: I would recommend an Ubuntu or Linux Mint boot disk first. They tend to have very broad hardware support.