I need WinXP help

[Speck102]

The other day, I set my computer to defragment my HDD(2 160gig drives in RAID 0) and left. When I checked back, the computer froze, the screen was blank, there was no activity for a few mins. I went ahead and restarted, and it boots up fine upto where you would normally log in, right before the login screen is supposed to show up, the computer just restarts. I tired safe mode, and nothing seems to help. I tried to run scandisk on the drives, but it came back saying that there are one or more unrecoverable errors on the drive, and it doesn't even bother to run scandisk. I went ahead and grabbed a 10gig drive, and installed XP on it in hopes of at least being able to recover some of my data. The RAID setup is recognized in the device manager on the new install, but won't show up in windows explorer. I only see the 10gig drive. Is there anything else I can try? Or am I pretty much screwed? Thanks in advance.

 

[montag451]

With RAID 0, you get the advantage of having faster disk access.

THE DISADVANTAGE is there is no redundancy - which means - if one of your disks loses data, you lose the data on both disks.

There may be a way to recover data, but not the installation

 

[montag451]

Sorry - meant to add.

Next time, use RAID1, or RAID 5. Or, if you have lots of cash and spare hdd's, RAID 10

 

[Speck102]

All I am hoping for is that there is a way to recover my data, I don't care about the OS. If anyone can help, please do. Also, I am not sure that either of my drives are bad, they both show up in the bios, and Windows does boot up to a point.

 

[JarredWalton]

Pull out the 10 GB drive and try running a repair installation of Windows XP onto your old RAID partition. It could just be that one critical file got corrupted during the defrag process.

 

[Speck102]

I tried that, but nothing I tried is working, I couldnt even reinstall windows over my old installation, I would have to reformat the HDD, I am just hoping that there may be some way of recovering my data, there are some items that I would really hate to lose.

 

[montag451]

Bear in mind that on RAID0, if you were using a 64KB stripe, then,
IF a file was 256KB,
first 64K on drive 1, second 64K on drive 2, third 64K on drive 1, fourth 64K on drive2...........................

I really do wish you the best of luck, but i can't see a way around it.
Do a search on google and other forums before formatting

 

[bleeb]

What in the sakes do you need 160 GIGs?? of RAID???

 

[Speck102]

I had over 150gigs of data, mostly stuff I didn't need, but there were just a few hundred megs of stuff I would like to recover. I tried a couple of different recovery programs, and they do not seem to be working. I am starting to think that I am screwed...