Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[CindyJ]

I am a real novice (and an idiot for not backing up). I bought the Puppy Live CD (which I guess has several versions) and wanted to try to recover date from a Raid 0 sata drive(s). Not sure if this is possible with the Puppy programs. Only one hard drive shows up and the files on this are gibberish. I just want to be able to copy the data/pictures to a USB external drive. Computer won't boot up (without Puppy) and I get Sata timeout error. Hard drives seem to be working and disk diagnostics shows they are ok. Setups shows them not present. Computer repair companies around here don't seem to know much about the Raid striping (we live in a rural area). I read the other topics here on Raid 0 but didn't understand it.

Is there a somewhat simple way to do this or can offer suggestions. I don't want to pay $450 to $1000 for recovery but am willing to pay $100 or so if I can do this in house myself. Are there programs that can put these two drives back together if they have become confused or someway to figure out the problem? Would this problem correct itself if I could find another motherboard? Our computer is a Dell XPS600.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[tempestuous]

Google tells me that the Dell XPS600 has an nForce4 Serial ATA RAID controller.
This is a host raid (bios raid) device, so under Linux you would need the dmraid utility.
Get dmraid from the second post in this forum thread -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=60973

Boot your damaged XPS600 with a Puppy 5.1 or 5.2 CD, then you can install the dmraid dotpet from a USB thumb drive, or even connect to the internet and download the dmraid dotpet directly.
Now follow the dmraid instructions I provided in the other post.

[CindyJ]

Thanks for replying so quickly. I know this is probably a dumb question. I accessed the internet from the damaged computer and clicked download next to the dmraid section in your other post. It looks like it copied a filed called viewtopic.php onto the file section in Puppy. How do I get this to install. It doesn't open. When I go to Set Run Action, it says it isn't an application. Also, how do I get to the device-mapper module where I see the Code: line?

[GustavoYz]

Tempestous means that you should download and install the ".pet" file of that post.
Direct Link to the package 'dmraid-1.0.0.rc16.pet':
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=33508

Then, you should read the further instructions of tempestuos thread about configuration...

Hope it helps.

[tempestuous]

GustavoYz is correct, but let me elaborate further.
When you click on the download link for dmraid-1.0.0.rc16.pet, take note of where the browser downloads to - I think it's /root/my-documents, but that may depend on what browser you are using.

To install the dotpet, just browse to it with ROX, then single-click on it.

[CindyJ]

I'm still having trouble getting the program to load. I found where the file was saved in my root folder. It saves as viewtopic.php. When I left click once, it briefly flashes and then does nothing. Left clicking twice does nothing also. I tried saving it in another folder and it still doesn't load. Is there some other way of opening the file or loading the program? I've tried loading it several times from the other forum thread and it seems to save each time but I just can't get it to open.

Thanks for your help.

[tempestuous]

[CindyJ]

Ok, I used an external hard drive and got the program loaded- yeah!! I was following the other forum thread and typed in dmraid -s. It looked like the drives were showing up - listed name, stripe, etc. I typed dmraid -a and got this message "dmraid: option requires an argument-- a" Do you know what this means?

[tempestuous]

[CindyJ]

Thank you I think this part worked. It says:
Raid set "nvidia_dciffcae" was activated.

However, after this it says
The dynamic shared library "libdmraid-events-nvidia.so" could not be loaded: libdmraid-events-nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory. It says this three times for dciffcae, dciffcae1, dciffcae2.

I entered ls /dev/mapper

It came back in yellow on white - hard to read but it seems to be

Control nvidia_dciffcae nvidia_dciffcae1 nvidia_dciffcase2

Not sure if this means all is working or not. If it is working, I'm not sure about the next step. I'm guessing I type after code:
mkdir /mnt/raid
mount /dev/mapper/nvidia_dciffcae/mnt raid

If this is correct, what do I do next or where do I look for the data. Am I mounting all three things (the regular one and 1 and 2) or is it changing the 1 and 2 to just the regular dciffcae?

Do I need to be clicking on the Mount icon?

Thanks,
Cindy

[CindyJ]

Ok, I have some more info. Two drives showed up at the bottom on the Puppy Program. one says dm-1 and the other dm-2. dm-1 is showing 39mb and dm-2 is showing 465g which was the hard drive space. Before we only had the one on there showing sda-1 at 39mb (along with the disk drive and external hard drive). I'm thinking I should mount the 465 one using the mount icon? I don't want to mess anything up so I'm going to wait to here from you before I do anything else.

Thanks,
Cindy

[tempestuous]

[CindyJ]

Ok, I typed all that in. It came back and said:
mount: special device /dev/nvidia_dciffcae does not exist.

This came back for each one. I can click on the icons at the bottom and the mount screen comes up. However, when I look under the drive section it is showing the sda1 as before. Is there something else I need to do in the mount section to select these drives? Is this a bad sign?

Also, I'm afraid to turn the computer off until I've done all I can. When I turned it on this last time, it had some trouble booting up (not sure if this was a problem from the last session or a cd drive problem). I had to turn it off and on a couple of times to get it to completely boot up.

[tempestuous]

Ah, sorry, this mount command is wrong -

[tempestuous]

And I just updated the dmraid dotpet, here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=459111#459111
This new version has more Puppy-compatible file locations, and it also includes upgraded libdevmapper libraries.

Because of the revised file locations, though, a fresh boot to the Puppy CD would be well advised.