Hard drive failure with Logical Volume management

[Reverend_Ricky]

My computer has three 500gb hard drives. When I bought the system, these three hard drive were “unified” into one large 1500gb single hard drive. Form researches online, I believe this is called logical volume management.

 

My computer was showing no signs of issues, save one reported instance of over-clocking some weeks ago. Turning it on one morning, I was told the operating system could not be found!

 

I booted via the widows CD. In the windows install, I could see that only two of the three hard drives were visible, both seemingly empty.

 

I believe that the master hard drive has failed, and the “linkage” across the three drives is therefore broken. This is casing the data on all three drives, including the two working ones, to not show. The two working drives profess to be empty, I expect as a result of their master drive with the "instructions" for the unification not working. I am extremely loathed to format any drives, as there is vital data on the system.

 

I am looking for some advice on drives “unified” by logical volume management, as this was how the system was setup at purchase, and I know little about it. Ideally, I’d like to restore the broken drive. However, I’d settle for getting the data off each of the three drives. I could put it into some external storage, and format my drives. I am happy(ish) to spend a bit of money on another new drive or two!

 

Any ideas?

[Dalo Harkin]

Right - you need to start again and use RAID -

if you can find/know which of the drives was the OS drive then you could reformat that one, install the OS again and then transfer the data off the other 2 and then use a RAID mirrored solution to make use of the other 2 drives and make sure that the data is backed up.

you at worst should only need to buy another drive if the one that had the OS on is completely beyond salvage.