Rebuild RAID 1 or find Lost MSOffice Key

[dsaint]

Have a machine with duel 500 GB WD Velociraptor drives (used to be) mirrored in a RAID 1 configuration. Had a co-worker playing footsie with the power cord which loosened it and caused the machine restarted a few times and eventually it refused to boot. Seems losing power during a reboot isn't a good thing.  The drives were setup in the RAID using the Intel RST (Rapid Storage Tech) drivers. Anyway in order to them up and running ASAP, I ran the recovery utility in Win 7 and presto, I have two independent drives now. One with a working version of Windows 7 Pro on the C-drive and a copy of the corrupted Win7Pro on the E-dive. Unfortunately the E drive really has all the software I need to get working. I do have a Windows-old directory on the working C-drive so it all seems to be there as well. I'd love to rebuild the registry on the bad drive if possible and then setup the RAID again. I figure that may be a lost cause; but I'd be happy getting the MS Office back up and running, was preloaded on the machine and I don't have the key. I've already loaded all the other software I can. I figure its on the bad drive somewhere. Anyone know where it's hiding?

I now do have a boot menu that allows me to choose which drive to start from. Seems to be a driver that's prevent windows from booting. Won't load in safe mode. I can't reload the RST driver without getting "platform not supported" error - future problem...

[Tripredacus]

You can't rebuild that array now because you have changed the data on one of the disks. Usually in the case of a failed mirror, I would ghost (sector copy) one of the drives to a blank disk of the same size. Then erase both of the original HDDs, and recreate the mirror. Then ghost the backup drive to the raid array.

But you say "the recovery utility" which makes me thing you didn't do a repair of the existing installation. Usually the case for IRST is that you can't create the mirror after the fact, say using 1 blank disk, because that is a feature not in "cheap" desktop boards, but more a feature in more expensive controllers. Some do apparently have the ability to do it, but typically the IRST will erase your FAT when it makes the mirror. You could use the outlined step from last paragraph to get your OS onto the RAID, but you would need the storage driver in your OS. You can experiment on getting that to work by changing the SATA mode in the BIOS to RAID and then boot your single disk. If it can boot, then the image should work on an actual array.

I can't say about your Office key. A pre-install Office doesn't have a product key only in the software. The only reason it would be there is if you put it there. It should be on a COA on the machine, or on your original disk packaging that came with the computer.

[jaclaz]

Well, a RAID 1 mirror is a mirror.

The disks - until they failed - had exactly the same contents.

So the Office install was on BOTH drives.

If - after the "repair" you performed the booting drive has no Office install, it only means that *somehow* the repair procedure removed it or some parts of it.

You can well (from another OS) copy the "working" Registry from first drive to second one, but the result will most probably be two separately working fine disk drives, BOTH without Office.

One of the two (very likely) will have a modified Disk Signature (automatically recreated by the Windows 7 booting with "separate" drives due to the conflict it will have found, as such one of the two disks won't have proper drive letter assignments (and as such won't boot properly until you fix/delete the DosDevices letter assignments).

As I see it your only way out (not easy at all, mind you) is to remove from the system (disconnect) the disk drive that is now booting and troubleshoot/fix (manually) the non-working one.

If all that is needed is the Office key, usually it can be retrieved by using some script ot little thrtdpart utility, however this may depend on the version of Office you had installed.

jaclaz