Recover single-disk Windows volume accidentally put into a newly created RAID 0 volume?

Recuva
1

I've read the FAQ for Recuva but I don't think it answers this..

A long time ago/in a galaxy far far away, on a Z68 motherboard machine using a 64 gig SDD as a cache disk with Intel RST in maximized (writeback) mode, after a nasty system crash which required me to disconnect the SSD just to get into the BIOS (otherwise it would just go through about 2 seconds of some rebuild routine and then hang) ...

I stupidly put the main drive into a newly created RAID 0 volume when I should have simply re-enabled the acceleration mode in the UI in Windows (7 64-bit Home Premium).. then probably made it worse by removing the SSD from the volume..

One or both of these steps wiped the drive, or boot record, or something, and now it won't boot ; this despite nothing more than a reboot after the volume was mistakenly created.

So, my understanding is that I could(?) boot the machine with a Windows XP cd, run Recuva from a flash drive, and recover the disk using an empty disk of identical size (or at least an empty partition bigger than the partition being recovered?)..

..only there isn't really any data I need from the machine, I just want to rescue my install so I don't have to setup/patch/settings change in a billion different things..

Can recuva do this?

2

No. Recuva will only recover files to a working O/S, in other words to a partitioned and functional system. If you could recover and reinstate the system files (which I doubt) then the original disk would be fine to use anyway. Then there's the rather important matter of the registry, where most of your billion settings live.

There's nothing to stop you trying, of course, but I don't think there'll be much money on success.