Expert: Mike Dacre - 11/10/2009

Question
Not a question about XP actually. I recently had my 8400 dell dimension go down and sent the hard drive away for examination (insurance). they said it was irrepairable so |i asked them to send back to me the hard drive disk. Ignorant of the 8400 set-up I was surprised to get two drives. i took it to the local fix-it store, and got charged £46.00 for the privilige of being told that nothing could be done witout the full-tower because the 'raid-set up' would not allow the hrad drives to talk to each otehr for data matching. Now I had no clue what was actually being said and I'm not a stupid person, but what i do know is that I have valuable data still on these drives and I paid £46.00 to be told I need the tower to make data recovery possible. Is that true? Or can I salvage the data using another solution? Did these guys take my money and give me a line??? your expertise is most welcome at this despairing point. Thanks. Paul

Answer
Hello Paul,

You mention there are two hard drives and if this is the case then yes, you may have had it set up in a raid configuration which would require both hard drives in order to recover the data. This is quite unusual of a configuration and would most likely not come from the factory in this method as most computer will not even ship with two hard drives, let alone being set up as a raid so my guess would be this was done at a later date, but regardless in order to attempt recovery you will require both hard drives, but not the actual 'tower' which is the computer (mainboard/cpu).. in theory, you should be able to take the two drives and view it using the same raid technology that was used when it was set up. This would be easy to figure out once you have the drives set up on a working computer, therefore yes, by all means you should be able to recover some data, unless the drive is physically damaged and then you would have some real troubles but my guess is the data corrupted is within the raid configuration. Regardless I suggest taking both hard drives to a technician that can help you with this.

As a general rule with regards to payment, you should be able to get an estimate with regards to initial diagnostics before being billed, in your case, especially since they were missing one of the drives, they were pretty much unable to do anything and that would be quite apparent when they see the one drive is configured in a raid fashion.  It would make sense to pay according to how valuable the data is.  What I would highly recommend once you do get things going again, is to utilize in a service such as CARBONITE which provides off-site backup which means so long as your computer is connected to the internet, your data is being backed up to a secure server not on your computer. Learn more and get an additional month free added to your yearly subscription.  At around $5 per month, this service makes sense.  Use this link for more information and to sign up for the additional month here:  http://tpsconsulting.com/carbonite.htm

hope this helps,

Sincerely


Mike Dacre
http://tpsconsulting.com
follow me on twitter @tpsconsulting