please help... i have no idea what just happened

[Tipnmo101]

I had a maxtor 13 gig, and 2 maxtor 20 gigs running raid0... my maxtor 13 gig was my boot hdd and had the os(s) on it.... today i picked up a 40 gig maxtor to replace it.. i backed up everthing on the raid drives (like i have everytime in the past) this time insted of installing on a already formated fat32 and partitioned drive ( i reformat about every month) i installed on the new drive (the 40 gig replaced the 13)... but i noticed windows xp was copying all the install files to my d drive (the raid drives) i didn't think much of it (haven't a clue if it had anything to do with it, just have to cover everything)..... everything continued normally.. on all the reboots it read that teh drives were in raid 0 (like it always has)... finally xp is all installed and setup... i go to my computer and the label of the d drive reads "ì?:╫tα≡èAQ"... all the folders and files read something similar..... so i restart... and the raid controller no longer reads that teh drives are in raid... just maxtor and the model #.... xp starts booting and it wants to scan the d drive.... can't even read what its saying... screen was instentlly filled with problems on the drive... i get mad right at the beginning and restart teh computer... skip the check this time and go strait to xp.... windows still reqegnizes it as a single 40 gig drive, even with the right amount of space used and available, the raid drive is fat32 and the 40 gig is ntfs... this was my first time using ntfs on this computer... i don't know if that has anything to do with it either... now my question is: is there anything i can do to save the info on those drives or better yet restore the array without creating a new one... i still have my 13gig unchanged... but sense the raid controller is now reading them as not in an array i think that just putting the old hdd in won't help..... plz don't respond by email... i have not set up a client.....

thx for any help
ian

 

[winterlude]

You could reformat the new 40 gig to fat 32 just like your raid drives so the hard drives can talk to each other.

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: winterlude
You could reformat the new 40 gig to fat 32 just like your raid drives so the hard drives can talk to each other.

that wont affect it xp can read fat and ntfs
during install you most likely need to give it the drivers for your raid controller.

it sounds like it installed to the raid partition but only fprmatted one drive...weird.
you want the OS on the new 40 gig correct?

pull out your raid array. leaving only the 404 gig in there. format it NTFS (much better than fat) do a full format not a quick one.

I thin kthe data from your array may be lost though

 

[Tipnmo101]

windows has the drivers.... xp has them installed.... and i am not installing xp to those drives... so durning install i shouldn't need to install the drivers should i? and i did do a low level format the first time... but some thing didn't work.. cause when i came back to the computer it was on "press a key to restart" so i restarted and it went back to "press a key to restart" so i popped the boot disk back in (another weird thing i could not get my cd to boot... it always has in the past, but wouldn't this time) and started the install over.. but after copy files to the hdd it went back to the press a key to restart.... so i think the problems might have started there... sense when i installed xp the drive was not preped and even tho the first time around i specified the 40 gig... it still copied all the files to the d drive and maybe the boot files... cause i think that "press a key to reboot" screen will come up if i were to take out all boot devices... after the second set of "press a key to reboot" i popped in the maxtor disk ( i didn't think it would let me do a format c: /q) and copied the io.sys, partitioned and formated... installed xp everything worked.. and here i am with the broken array... any ideas.. seems like i downloaded a program that would try and fix a broken array.... but i can't remember the name... and it was in my download folder on the raid drives..... so again any help is greaty apprectiated...
thx
ian

 

[mcveigh]

reinstall with only the 40 gig in it

 

[Tipnmo101]

whats reformating with the only the 40 gig going to do? bump for ideas on how to recover info from teh drives

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: Tipnmo101
whats reformating with the only the 40 gig going to do? bump for ideas on how to recover info from teh drives

reformatting the 40 gig is to do a clean install. from your previous posts it sounds like you windows OS is not working correctly...or is it?

if you did indeed format 1 drive from a raid0 array you are out of luck for recovering the data, sorry.

 

[Tipnmo101]

nonono.... i know i didn't format any of the raid drives... and i don't think there is anything wrong with xp ... but i went ahead and did a low level format and reinstalled xp on a ntfs partition and unhooked the other drives..... i still have the same thing.... i didn't do anything that i can think of that would have broken the array... thats why i am hoping that something can be done.... the only thing that i could think of is xp messed somthing up when copying install files to the raid drives