Amandaville
Junior Member
I have two Western Digital Internal Hard Drives from an old Windows computer. They were configured as a RAID 0 pair using the built-in RAID capability of the motherboard. I seem to recall the built-in RAID controller being Intel, but it was quite a while ago and I could be mistaken. The motherboard died long ago but now I want to take on the project of retrieving the data on the drives. What is the easiest way?
I thought I would create a VHD/VDI image of each of the drives and put them in a VirtualBox VM, but I don't know if it's possible to configure VirtualBox to pair the two drives in RAID 0 to read the data they contain. Or is it possible to connect them both with SATA-to-USB adapters to my current computer and recreate the RAID array in software? I don't have any SATA connections available on my current computer.
I guess my biggest question is... How do I tell the computer (whether hardware or VM), that they are a RAID pair and rebuild the array without the original motherboard? The inner workings of RAID have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I'm really hoping that I can simply install a package/software then point to the two drives and have my data available, but I'm guessing it's not going to be that easy. It would be a bonus if I can do it all in Linux since I haven't used Windows in nearly a decade, but that's why I thought a Windows VM might be an option.
I thought I would create a VHD/VDI image of each of the drives and put them in a VirtualBox VM, but I don't know if it's possible to configure VirtualBox to pair the two drives in RAID 0 to read the data they contain. Or is it possible to connect them both with SATA-to-USB adapters to my current computer and recreate the RAID array in software? I don't have any SATA connections available on my current computer.
I guess my biggest question is... How do I tell the computer (whether hardware or VM), that they are a RAID pair and rebuild the array without the original motherboard? The inner workings of RAID have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I'm really hoping that I can simply install a package/software then point to the two drives and have my data available, but I'm guessing it's not going to be that easy. It would be a bonus if I can do it all in Linux since I haven't used Windows in nearly a decade, but that's why I thought a Windows VM might be an option.
