recover IDE RAID 0+1 Array?

[Fat Tone]

A friend has a 4-drive 0+1 RAID array which ran directly from his now defunct motherboard. The drives are IDE.

He'd like to reconnect the drives and extract what he can, but of course modern mobos are all sata. I see there are a few 2-port IDE RAID PCI cards out there for £10-15. Is it likely that these will be able to see his existing array and let him recover the data?
As the array was striped and mirrored, presumably only one half of the mirror would be needed?

Ta.

[rylan]

It depends on how the RAID hardware set up the array... I've seen some that you can plug into another controller and it works, and some that don't.
Yeah, you should grab the two striped disks and connect them to the controller card and see what happens. If the new controller kills the array for some reason, you still have the mirrored disks with the data intact.

[cjolley]

My admittedly limited experience with this is that it might work.
But he will need to set up the new array EXACTLY the same way the old one was.
Same stripe size, drive pairs, everything.
Then hope the partition(s) show up.
Or maybe get something like Acronis Disk Director to search for partitions if you can't see any.

Someone else is likely to know more, but I did recover a stripe set (no mirror) this way once durring my adventures .

[Fat Tone]

Thanks, it sounds like its worth a try. The alternative I guess would be to look for a mobo with the same chipset as the fried one on ebay.

[Marshmallowman]

Yeah try to match the chipset, however I do know some RAID card have incompatabilies betwen different firmware versions(damn you highpoint, damn you to hell )

But I also recall some people having success with some software recovery of RAID partitions.. could be Acronis like chuck said, but I can't recall.

mostly lilkely chipsets on older boards are silicon image, highpoint and promise. But intel and nvidia have had their own RAID functionaly for quite a while as well.