Help !! : SATA Raid 0 Array No Longer Booting to Windows xP

[Nantik]

Hi,

The backstory is:

My Dell Dimension XPS is setup with a raid 0 array on 2 SATA 120GB Seagate Barracuda Hardrives. Windows XP was running fine and suddently the machine freezes and upon reboot the Promise FastTrack S150 TX4 utility said the array was unfunctional.

After deleting the array and redefining it, now the PC goes to boot up normally, but right after the "Hit f1 to continue, hit f2 to enter setup" screen, I get 1 beep and then the machine just hangs on the same screen. It won't load windows, it still allows for a soft reboot though.

So just wondering if there's anyway to rebuild the array and load windows without issue, or a way to get the data off the 2 drives before reformatting (just about everything is on there ). One bit of information that may be relevant, is that 1 of the drives in the array shows one of the disk sizes as 120000 and the other as 120034. Don't know if that means anything.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

More than likely you had a drive failure. This is why it's foolish to use RAID 0. The performance gain is negligible and the risk great. There is NO redundancy, and you double the risk of data loss.

If the data wasn't aready history, you nuked it when you deleted and redifined the array.

To find out which drive is functional you need to boot using the drive manufacturer's diagnotic (or Dell's 32bit diagnostic and select drive controller). If this system is under warranty you should have on-site service available. Play stupid on the phone with tech support (or they'll make you diagnose it yourself) and insist that they send a tech over to fix it.

 

[SeTeS]

There's a chance that your raid controller lost its settings (like if you inadvertently reset your bios to default values or something). If you remember for certain what settings you used when defining your array, you should be able to rebuild the array using those same parameters w/o losing any data. If however, one of the drives is corrupt, you're sol.

Re: the performance gain... It's likely true that typical usage (loading the os, loading apps, browsing the web) won't see an extraordinary boost in speed. But, for certain tasks such as r/w very large files, or in my case, crunching very large databases, a raid array will give an obvious increase in speed.

Good Luck!

 

[montag451]

There is software called RAID RECONSTRUCTOR that you MIGHT be able to use to recover SOME of your data.
But, if one of the drives is kaput, then, so is your data.

The way RAID0 works, is to write some data to HDD1, then HDD2, then HDD1 etc.