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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1926 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration.

Another reply pointed out, "Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this."

But they are the sort of thing that a geek who wanted to squeeze out a little more performance (speaking from experience) might be tempted to turn on, so IMHO the first thing to do is to load the BIOS and record (even if just with a few photos) the configuration, just to make sure there aren't any weird settings like RAID striping that might be necessary to read the drives but might be lost in a reset.

The specs say the motherboard system has a built in raid. But I'm not clear if it was required, and he did use this system for gaming, and he typically used raids for redundancy not speed. OTOH he also did a lot of graphics processing ... yeah, betting going with a drive enclosure isn't going to solve my problem here. Still, worth a first pass.

Sorry for the late reply.

A drive enclosure might actually solve your problem here! To be safe from weird RAID (or logical volume, I guess) issues, the trick is just that you don't want to try to mount any filesystems on the drive directly, you want to make a copy of the raw drive image, and then you can experiment with copies at leisure without risking any overeager software doing anything to screw up the original. I'd personally take the image from a system with a Linux "rescue" distribution, to avoid anything trying to be "user-friendly" by auto-mounting filesystems and auto-"repairing" anything that doesn't mount cleanly, but you could prevent such "repairs" even more surely by using an enclosure with a hardware write-protection switch.

Once you've got backups I wouldn't worry at all about the original hardware. Digital memories are irreplaceable and get more valuable with age; computer hardware depreciates fast.

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