Help: Raid 0 no longer works

[turtlepower]

Is one of my hard drives in my Raid 0 array dead? I've got two 120gb WD drives in Raid 0 from my Epox mobo, and another hard drive not in the array

I was typing up some homework in word when I heard a couple clicking noises from one on my hard drives. Windows XP Pro froze up, and forced me to press the reset button. Well, I can no longer get into Windows. It hangs on blank page right after the Windows splash page that shows a loading progress bar. When I try to get into Safe Mode, it freezes on a page that scrolls what drivers it's loading (don't think this matters but the last driver it tries to load is agp440.sys)

When I boot from my XP cd, if I choose "repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console," it brings to this DOS Prompt, and it's strange because when I type in "dir," it doesn't show the contents of my c:\ drive, it shows the contents of my hard drive that is not in the raid 0 array. If I choose "set up Windows XP," it doesn't detect a previous windows installation so pressing "r" to repair it isn't an option. It only shows the drive not in the Raid Array.

When the computer is loading, I can press <Ctrl><H> to run BIOS Setting Utility. And that brings me to the setup of the Raid Array, and that still sees my 2 hard drives in the raid array, but I'm not sure if it just remembers it, or if it's detecting it as it shows me (meaning my hard drives are still good to go).

So, any suggestions of what I can do to get this running again? or have I lost all my data... thanks in advance for any input

 

[unhappy_mage]

Did you load the drivers for your raid controller from a floppy when you loaded the Windows repair disk? I hope you kept backups...

 

[Ockie]

Sounds like you found yourself a bad drive Like mage said, hope you backed everything up

Ahh the joys of RAID 0.

 

[turtlepower]

Yeah, I tried to load my raid drivers when booting from the Windows cd. I pressed F6 to load the "3rd party drivers" but "setup was unable to load support for the mass storage device you specified"

so I specified one, inserted the floppy, and it hangs when it is Examining 228880 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on hpt3xx...

anyways, looks like i'll have to take it like a man... for the most part, i kept backups, but there's simple things i would like to have back like my IE favorites.... oh well

edit: just thought about this, if one of the hard drives is dead, all data is lost... so how would it know to load the windows splash screen? since it does show the windows splash page and freezes after that, maybe the drives are still alive? i dunno, i could just be grasping for straws here

 

[tuskenraider]

You could just have a corrupted installation for whatever reason. If your current install is dead, might as well kill the array, run a manufacturers diagnostic on the drives to check health and if it's good, do an OS reinstall. Obviously it doesn't address the cause, but sometimes unexplicable things happen. Doing things like memory and PSU testing might be a good idea.

 

[ZeroH]

did you try going into the raid manager and have it check the volume?

 

[turtlepower]

I just booted from my WD Data Lifeguard Tools floppy, and it said ALL my hard drives were error free

ZeroH, what do you mean by checking the volume? When I go into the Raid manager, I have 4 options:
1. Create Array
2. Delete Array
3. Create/Delete Spare
4. Select Boot Disk

under channel status, it does show my two hard drives in the raid array...

thanks for the input everyone, I really appreciate it... looks like most likely I'll just do what tuskenraider said and do an OS resinstall

 

[ZeroH]

aah.. i thought it may have the option of checking the array.. i guess not.

you could do a disk check using the vendor's software.. and you can do that before you rebuild to see if the HD is bad. It being on RAID should not affect the disk check.
--- nevermind.. it sounds like you already did that.

Good luck

 

[Lazn_Work]

edit: just thought about this, if one of the hard drives is dead, all data is lost... so how would it know to load the windows splash screen? since it does show the windows splash page and freezes after that, maybe the drives are still alive? i dunno, i could just be grasping for straws here

Simple: the drive that is not in the raid array likely is the active drive.. This is why when I install XP I only have the boot drive (or array) connected until after xp setup is complete. Then I add the other drives. I have had this happen to me before where the wrong drive had ntldr etc on it because the xp installer is stupid, the system wouldn't boot unless both drives were in the system and working. Needless to say I fixed that on my next reinstall.