Recover data from NTFS disk after RAID1 mirror operation

Question

I have two identical disks attached to my Asus P5Q Motherboard which are not operating in RAID1 mode. Disk1 (640 GB, almost full) is/was 2 partitions (system, data - both NTFS) and disk2 (640 GB, 80 GB occupied) 1 partition (NTFS) for data only. The problem with the motherboard is, that the default settings are to operate the disks in RAID1 mode. Yesterday somehow the BIOS settings were reset to default (I suspect the battery is empty) and the disks were configured as RAID1. Unfortunately, I realised it only half an hour later (switched PC on and went away) and the controller had that time to mirror disk2 onto the other disk. I tried some recovery programs such as testdisk, photorec and pc inspector file recovery but could only find partitions/data from disk2. Any chance to still access the data from disk1?

Regards, Mathias

Answer 1

The professional version of File Scavenger ($185) can salvage data off even broken RAID drives. That said, because drive 1 was almost full, and 80 GB was written to it, you will almost certainly have lost some data to files being overwritten. However, if there was a lot of one-of-a-kind data, this tool will recover a lot for you. I recovered almost everything off a broken RAID 5 once, including an Exchange (Microsoft e-mail) database.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

In the meantime, do not use the computer, or either disk, as you risk losing more data. You would want to run File Scavenger, or any other data recovery program, from another computer, with the disks you are trying to recover installed as secondary disks.