[Sussex] Retrieving data from mirrored disks

[Fay Zee]

Hi, Can anyone advise me how to retrieve data from a mirrored disk, please?

I tried putting each disk into an external HDD caddy on two other  
Linux machines but could not read them, and did not get any meaningful  
information when running a live gparted disk.

The mirrored disks are 500GB SATA but there is also an additional  
500GB SATA disk in the machine, which I wasn't using. I don't know  
which two are the mirrors.

My (desktop) motherboard has developed a fault. The machine boots up  
and the disks spin, and there are beeps which we've compared to the  
manual, but I am not getting graphics. There are no graphics with a  
live CD or DVD either.

Ten minutes and two start-ups prior to this fault, the boot up message  
reported that it started up with only one of the mirrored disks.

The operating system is Debian Squeeze, installed in mirror mode.

The motherboard actually supports mirroring but I believe the  
mirroring is entirely software driven.

I had intended to upgrade to Debian Wheezy at the beginning of  
December, so skipped a back-up.

I had a friend round who repairs hardware for a living. We tried  
removing the battery, shorting out the bios, swapping out the monitor,  
the graphics card, the power unit and took out the memory sticks in  
turn, as well as testing all the connections.

It is a Gigabyte GA M720 US3 nVidia chipset dual bios with extra thick copper.
The processor is AMD Phenom II AM2+ quad core 940.
The graphics card is 512MB DDR3 nVidia Geforce 9600GT PCI express -  
there is no onboard graphics.
There are four 2GB dual channel DDR2 800 PC2 6400 RAM memory sticks.

The machine was built for me in 2009.


Best regards,
Fay
--
East Grinstead Linux User Group
www.eglug.org.uk