Windows XP Pro Knoppix recovery question

[Bob44]

Running Windows XP Pro w SP3 I have a duo core intel 2.6 with 4 gb ram 2 WD 150 10,00RPMS Hard drives in RAID 0 with a 3rd 500gb for storage
I run 2 8800 Ultra GTX video cards in SLI. I updated the drivers to 180.48 from NVIDIAs Web site with my SLI disabled and the bridge removed.
Rebooted fine running the new drivers on one card. I then installed the 2nd card & bridge jumper and enabled SLI mode through nvidia control
panel. This was going fine until it said it would need to shut down some software to finish the installation. I hit ok and instant
CRASH to black screen.
No luck on reboot. Black screen. I Pulled one card out swapped sockets and cards one at a time nothing.

I could boot to the bios screen tapping F8 and even get to the safeboot boot screen holding DEL key and tried to boot to last known good configuration. I tried every option on that screen and still got black screen.

After some research I then booted to my CD Rom drive 1st and used my Windows XP Pro installation disk. To try to repair. The windows
Install CD is only showing the D drive which was my data drive. Which has none of the windows system files on it just storage stuff.. I was ble to swicth to the C: drive with the dos prompt but could get any further to see anything on the drive with any dos commands.
I then read up on Linux and Knoppix and created a LINUX 5.1.1 bootable CD and was able to "see" my hard drive partions. The Knoppix desktop showed Hard Disk nvidia_fdbijcig1 and Hard Drive sdc1 and can click on them and see all the files and folders. The nvidia one looks to be a complete set of all files and folders from my C: drive. And the sd1c has all the storage drive stuff.

I then went to media and saw these items cdrom fd0 hd hda hdb nvidia_fdbicig1 sdc1 test

Right clicking and checking properties they all all empty and 3.4mb in size with the exception of nvidia_fdbicg1 it is 279.5GB with 126.46 free same as my c: drive was. and sdc1 has 465GB with 452.7 free.

Not sure at where to go from here. I beleive I could get a exteranl drive hooked to muy USB and copy these files to at least save them...but I think I could be just a few steps away from maybe getting my computer to boot up using the 2 150GB 10,00RPM drives in RAID 0 again...

Any help greatly appreciated.

I dont know where to go from here but it appears that at a critical step in the update driver process NVIDIA's install process crapped
out and left me hanging with a C: drive that cant boot....

Any help greatly appreciated,,,

[Harry Kuhman]

I don't think you're going to recover files from a RAID 0 system based on Windows only software RAID drivers with Knoppix or any Linux system. If it's a hardware RAID system you should be OK (more or less, although RAID 0 more than doubles your chance of complete data loss), but most people who post here with RAID issues are using software RIAD solutions. While Linux does have some RAID software, it's not likely that the drive geometry would match exactly, which would be required for proper file recovery.

While you may think that you can see files when you look at a drive with Knoppix, you're only seeing the directory blocks, and Knoppix is assuming that the data is only on one drive, not spanning both drives. It's looking in the wrong place for the actual file data.

Your best bet, if it is a software RAID system, would be to install XP on another drive on a different IDE connection on your computer (even if you need to add an IDE interface) and then install the RAID drivers and try to access the RAID array as a second drive.