I needed to do some troubleshooting on an HP desktop system running Microsoft Windows 8 that would no longer boot into Windows. The system has three 2 TB drives configured as a RAID 5 array providing 4 TB of storage, but one of the drives had failed. I could boot the system from Linux rescue CDs, but, since I didn't have an appropriate driver to access the drives as a 4 TB RAID array, I couldn't access user files on the system by that method. I could boot into the Windows recovery environment and choose the advanced options, which would allow me to get to a command prompt.
I could then copy files from the drives to an external USB drive using
xcopy, but the user had over 900,000 files in her
My Documents directory and xcopy only copied about 800,000 of
those. I wanted to try another method of copying the files to see if
that would be more successful, but there were no other utilities available
to me from the command prompt that I thought would be more successful.
I created a boot disc on another Windows 8 system using MustangPEBuilder 2 ADK, which allowed me to boot into a Windows GUI, but without the appropriate driver added I haven't yet been able to access the data in the user's My Documents directory with it. I have been able to add Windows applications, such as IrfanView, but I haven't figured out yet how to get some other applications I want to use added nor a driver that will allow me to access the RAID drives.
