plonq | Full recovery

I dreamt last night that we were flattening cats with giant, cartoon mallets. It was a bit like a video game; our laundry room had become infested with cats, and they were running around everywhere while we methodically flattened them with oversized mallets. There was no blood, nor guts in the process. One moment there would be a running cat, and the next moment a flat cat. The fun went out of it when I was about to flatten another cat and I recognized it as Merry.

In other news...

When my MB imploded last year, I explored a number of avenues for trying to recover the data from the RAID0 drives I had been running when it died. I looked at (and rejected) those expensive data-recovery services. I considered buying a replacement motherboard on eBay, but the only places that seemed to be selling it any more were all in Hong Kong, and the shipping cost to Canada was ridiculous. I tried a few dodgy software options, but other than the sneaking suspicion that one of the programs had corrupted the RAID structure on one of my drives, I met with no success.

A friend at work has been dealing with a similar RAID issue, and on Monday he emailed me alink to this little free-ware application. He had stumbled upon it on the weekend, and while he had not had a chance to try it yet, he seemed to think that it looked like what I needed for my old drives. Oh, and could I please let him know if it works if'n I happen to get around to testing it before him? In other words, "I'm afraid to risk my own data, so could you please try this program for me and tell me if it destroys your drives?"

It did not destroy my data - in fact this is a really slick little program. Counting the time it took to download and install this application and rip apart my system to plug in the old Samsung drives, it took me just over an hour to recover 100% of the data from my old RAID drives. I is happy.