Some good news on the hardware front...
On the dying, old machine I was using the facility of the motherboard's ICH5R southbridge chip to mirror two drives to get redundancy for my personal data. It's not strictly the chipset doing it, it's an interaction between the firmware and the Windows driver, known by some (and not in a complementary fashion) as "fake RAID"*.
With the problems on the old box almost certainly being CPU or motherboard related, I did have a minor qualm about whether or not I would be able to read the data from either of the mirrors on the replacement hardware. However, The Monolith's "southbridge" chip is an ICH10R, so I decided to try a single drive from that mirror set.
I needn't have worried. The firmware picked it up, saw that it was a member of a degraded mirror set (ie, grabbed metadata off the drive itself) and, after the OS had booted, I was able to access its contents. They're now safely on The Monolith.
That at least has put me in a good mood with respect to this situation!
With the problems on the old box almost certainly being CPU or motherboard related, I did have a minor qualm about whether or not I would be able to read the data from either of the mirrors on the replacement hardware. However, The Monolith's "southbridge" chip is an ICH10R, so I decided to try a single drive from that mirror set.
I needn't have worried. The firmware picked it up, saw that it was a member of a degraded mirror set (ie, grabbed metadata off the drive itself) and, after the OS had booted, I was able to access its contents. They're now safely on The Monolith.
That at least has put me in a good mood with respect to this situation!