First of all, if you had data on that drive it was not your "operating 
system" drive. It was a data drive (:

Now, it all depends on what kind of drive failure you're having. If the 
drive is still accessible, mount it and copy the files off. If you want to 
be safe (and have the room), connect it to another computer and use dd to 
make an image of it, then mount and work with that image rather than the 
actual drive. I would definitely need more information to give you better 
advice.


In the future, try to store important data away from the OS drive, and 
BACK IT UP. Please note that a RAID device is NOT A BACKUP. It's a more 
reliable and redundant storage device, but you should still back stuff up. 
What you could do is keep all your important data on the system drive, and 
back it up to the RAID device.

You could back up the entire virtual machine files, but yes, Shared 
Folders in VirtualBox is a good idea, too (then you only have to back up 
that data directory). It's fairly trivial to set up; you just have to make 
sure you install the Guest Additions on your guest system.



On Thu, 16 Jul 2015, o1bigtenor wrote:

> Greetings
> 
> I have a large system with a fair number of resources which has just come
> home from the hospital (computer) when I had a disk drive fail abruptly.
> 
> 1.The tech tells me that the hard drive can be accessed. How do I do a low
> level transfer to another hard drive?
> (This would mean that I would have empty sectors but there is some
> information that I would like to get.)
> 
> 2. The drive was my 'operating system' drive. That meant that here is where
> I kept my 14 VirtualBox machines. (One was my business record keeping
> (accounting) and that is the one that I want real bad but its only 16 months
> of data so it can be redone but its painful!)
> 
> How do I set up the hard drive so that files can be moved to my RAID array
> (which should be just fine) - - - or should I?
> Should I be setting up this drive as it was before but just looking for a
> way to do backups?
> As I understand it operating systems on RAID isn't nice - - - or is it?
> 
> I am looking for something that doesn't crap out so completely. I understand
> I should have had backups but I wasn't able to get the shared folder stuff
> working so that I could seamlessly transfer stuff to my main array. That
> would also be a viable option if someone can tell me how to cudgel
> VirtualBox into submission.
> 
> Questions welcomed.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Dee
> 
>