Resolved Server 2008 failure, not recognizing disk with data

I have a 32 bit windows enterprise server 2008 with C: drive and a separate mirrored raid (SATA) in hardware (Dell Precision 370), that took a lightning hit. Had to replace motherboard and after that windows got stuck in reboot loop. Kept on getting to mouse pointer then rebooting.

Finally I just reinstalled server 2008 fresh now the system is up but the raid (only one drive shows in windows), the raid shows rebuild in hardware but with main drive as normal

Drive with data shows as not allocated and windows wants to initialize it. I expected it to be foreign. Disk shows in storage manager as Disk1 Not Initialized and Unallocated,

I really do not want to lose the data on this disk.

Any Assistance is greatly appreciated.

 

How was the RAID created ? Was it through BIOS or Win Server or add on card ?

 

bios, at one time the server did boot before I rebuilt it and the data was readable, but the raid is in rebuild status.

 

Rebuild status ? For BIOS RAID you should not get that message anywhere in Windows.

 

No, I don't get it in windows, I get it at startup time.

 

Hmm.

The lightning strike may have done something to your hard disk too.

We have to get that data off first of all before we do anything further.

Boot from a Linux live cd. If you don't have one, grab Ubuntu Live cd & burn it as per direction.

Linux should be able to see the RAID hard disk & access the data. If it can't, you are in a big soup.

 

After booting ubuntu it was telling me I it had a bad mbr and I needed to open it in windows to do a chkdsk /f. Well upon booting the next time the hardware raid started telling me the raid had failled and unrecoverable, this was new. With windows up I went into diskpart and the disk was showing * for Dynamic Disk. I tried to rebuild it to no avail. Did a little googling and discovered I could *maybe* convert the disk back to a basic disk without losing any data, worth a try.

Downloaded disk editor tool HxD hex editor, changed location Sector 0 Location 1C2 from 42 (Dynamic) to 07 (Basic) and on next reboot windows did a chkdsk /f corrected lots of stuff and the dis is now readable.

Thanks to everyone for the ideas.

 

Very good work.

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