RAID issues-HD failure or Controller failure?

Marauder

I have 2 80gig SATAs in a RAID-0 array, with my OS on them....which I will never do again thanks to this . I got a fatal error that didnt crash the machine, but I got a little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in my system tray, which Ive not had the pleasure of witnessing before. So I restarted. It gave me a file error which flashed too quickly for me to see. On reboot it gave me Windows CHKDSK.....which fixed a corrupted bootlog a few years back so I let it run. After it was done it rebooted.....went to windows loading screen....then just black.

After some looking around in the BIOS I kind of figure a HDD has failed....in my striped set, meaning kaput. However when I run the RAID utility, it sees the drives, IDs and sizes......So I go to the onboard RAID Controller utility and it says no drives located, no arrays present.....

Now when it reboots it says no IDE drives detected...

So is this perhaps a case of the onboard controller failing and just not seeing the drives anymore? or of an actually failed drive not being read because of RAID-0 setup?

I guess the simplest solution would be to buy a SATA drive (or 2) and plug them into the motherboards ports and see if it can see them.....but Id prefer to buy a 25-30 dollar PCI controller and test that rather than a couple of 75-100 dollar drives. Opinions? Solutions? Im just barely average when it comes to hardware savvy so keep the jargon simple if you could...

Also Id REALLY like to pull some non-backedup files (photos, drafting files) off of the 2-80g if it is a controller issue.......any help on going about this without pulling my hair out?

Any and all help appreciated....

vonPoonBurGer

Marauder wrote:

Now when it reboots it says no IDE drives detected...

No IDE drives? Isn't that to be expected, since you're using a SATA RAID controller? I think some motherboards support both SATA and IDE RAID, but use different RAID controllers to do so (for example, an Intel ICH chip for SATA RAID, and a VIA or HighPoint chip for IDE RAID). Make sure you're in the RAID setup utility for the SATA RAID controller, if that's the case.

Marauder wrote:

I guess the simplest solution would be to buy a SATA drive (or 2) and plug them into the motherboards ports and see if it can see them.....but Id prefer to buy a 25-30 dollar PCI controller and test that rather than a couple of 75-100 dollar drives. Opinions? Solutions? Im just barely average when it comes to hardware savvy so keep the jargon simple if you could...

What makes you think a PCI SATA RAID controller is going to be able to perceive your SATA drives as a RAID set? There's absolutely no guarantee that any controller card you pick up is going to look at the drives and see anything meaningful. There's no standard in terms of how to lay out data on a RAID-0 array, it's entirely up to the manufacturer of the controller. A controller card from the same manufacturer as the onboard controller might work, but even that's not for certain. I wouldn't recommend spending money on either, really, I doubt new hardware is going to fix the problem. Either it's a BIOS / RAID controller setup thing, in which case changing some settings should fix it, or it's drive / controller damage, in which case you're hooped in any event.

Marauder

So basically take it to someone who knows what the fuck theyre doing?