Single OS hdd crashed. Need to recover Data raid array

[Feisters]

I have three hard drives in my system. One is a Maxtor Diamond Max, and the other two are WD800JB's. The Maxtor drive is drive C and has my OS (XP Home) and some system specific programs on it. The WD's are Raid 0 (drive E ) and contain everything else (programs, games. data).

When I tried to defrag drive C:, defrag said that chkdsk was scheduled to run on the drive. Well chkdsk wasn't scheduled, so I'm not sure why it was telling my this. So I went ahead and ran Norton Disk Doctor. NDD found all kinds of problems on C:. I let NDD run through all the scans and repairs, and when the system rebooted, I get a "can not load the operating system message". I rebooted several more times, and kept getting the same message. Finally, I booted with my XP CD and tried to recover, including FIXMBR, but to no avail. Several reboots later the p.o.s.t. now says "Primary master hard disk fail" (and the bios hdd auto-detect no longer lists the drive correctly). So I figure the Maxtor drive is nackered.

When I replace the Maxtor (with something other than a Maxtor) and reinstall XP, what are my chances that I'll be able to access my raid array on the other drives? I'm thinking that as long as I install the correct raid drivers during the XP install, I should be able to recover my data files before reinstalling my programs. Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

[mechBgon]

I think you're correct. The RAID chip has the responsibility for the array. You can replace the Maxtor, install WinXP on it as usual, then give WinXP the drivers so it can talk to the RAID chip, and the RAID chip will say "hey, well at the moment I've got this array here" and WinXP will say, "oh cool, I'll list it in Disk Management and my keyboard-to-chair interface unit can assign it a drive letter if he wants to" and you should be ok from there on.

If your data was encrypted under the previous WinXP installation, however, it will still be there but will be unreadable by the new WinXP installation. Hopefully you didn't go and encrypt it.

 

[Feisters]

The data on drive E is not encrypted. But I guess if I can't recover the array, I'll just have to rebuild it. One of these days I'll learn to backup.

 

[mechBgon]

The array should be independent of the operating system. I think you'll be ok unless the OS managed to mess some stuff up on the array before your Maxtor went *poof*. You can go into your RAID card's BIOS and check the status of the RAID0 array to confirm it's healthy.

 

[Feisters]

Mmm.... I went into the raid bios at p.o.s.t. and the status of the Primary Master is Hidden, and the status of the Secondary Master is BOOT. That definately is not right.

 

[mechBgon]

Eeeek, it doesn't show your RAID0 array? Scums! And the Maxtor wasn't being hosted by the RAID, but by the standard IDE controllers, correct?

 

[Feisters]

Yes, it shows my raid array. It's a Highpoint 372 and I press Ctrl+H at p.o.s.t. to access the raid cmos setup. The drives should be listed under status as hdd0 and hdd1. They are connected to hdd3 and hdd4 on the mobo (the raid connectors), but logical hdd0 and hdd1 is what they should be under the raid array. They should not be statused as Hidden and Boot. I can change the Boot staus to HDD0 on the Secondary Master, but can not select the Hidden disk to make any changes (because it's Hidden).