Yesterday I mentioned the evils of software mirroring. I'm happy to announce that after 3 days and 20+ hours - all of the data has been recovered.

WARNING - Geek speak ahead, proceed with caution...

And what was the major malfunction? It seems the drives and/or IDE controller would not allow a single drive jumpered as master. If a second drive was on the chain the jumper was required, but when no second drive was on the chain the jumper had to be removed. All of which for some reason brings to mind this quote:

"As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly" - Arthur Carlson

Of course getting the jumper issue resolved did not mean that the data was easily available, since the second drive of the mirror set would not fully boot (BSOD every time). That's where my tool kit came in handy. On a copy of the drive I was able to shuffle the MBR, find the 75GB partition and switch it from a dynamic partition to a bastardized basic NTFS partition. From there I was able boot to into 2000 and use the CDR drive to backup files.

On the positive side, my data forensics skills are now up to date. In case you're wondering what tools it takes; here's what I used: Winternals Administrator Pack, PowerQuest DriveImage (to duplicate the disk before attempting recovery), JSI's excellent Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 knowledge base, and Bart's NT Boot Disk.

Adventure over.