Broken RAID 0 Array

I'm not sure if this should be in the Windows XP or the PC Hardware section.

Yesterday night I shutdown my PC and it was fine. This morning I turned on my PC and it says I got a broken RAID 0 and will not boot to the desktop.

I have an Abit IT7 MAX motherboard and it has built in raid. I have two hard drives on RAID 0 setup.

My PC will boot up and when it says "Scan Devices. Please wait..." it detects both of my hard drives. Then after this message it usually says "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." then boots to the desktop. Right now, after the scan devices message it will automatically go into the RAID setup page. During this time my hard drive does not make a strange noise. If I press Ctrl + Alt + Delete key to restart, the hard drive will make a strange clicking sound after the PC restarts. Inside the RAID setup page it gives me some options:

1. Power off and check the failed drive
2. Destroy the striping Array
3. Hide the broken array and continue to boot

I tried option 1 so far but it gives me the message "This item does not support APM. Please power off manually and check your drive connections." So I checked my drive connections and both of the hard drives and everything looks normal. I tried to run my PC with only 1 hard drive plugged in and found out that one of the hard drives makes a strange noise, I think this hard drive might be internally damaged. The hard drive that I think is damaged is on IDE 4, the good hard drive is on IDE 3, there is also IDE 5 and 6, these IDE slots are to be used for RAID only.

When I only have the good hard drive plugged in, this is the information from the RAID setup screen:
Channel 1 Master: Maxtor 6L040L2 (IDE 3)
Array Name: RAID_0_0
Mode: ATA/133
Size 40.02

When I only have the other hard drive that makes strange noise plugged in, this is the information from the RAID setup screen:
Channel 2 Master: Maxtor 6L040L2 (IDE 4)
Array Name: (This part is blank)
Mode: PIO 4 (I think usually it says ATA/133)
Size 19.74 (I think this should be 40.02)
Status: Boot (I'm guessing my PC uses this hard drive to boot from)

When I only have the strange noise hard drive plugged in, I have these options in the RAID setup screen:
1. Create Array
2. Delete Array
3. Create/Delete Spare
4. Select Boot Disk
When I try to boot with this hard drive it goes to the "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." message then the hard drive makes a strange noise.

When I have the good hard drive plugged in I have the same options as the ones from when both hard drives are plugged in. When I try to boot with only this hard drive it goes straight to the RAID setup screen.

My question is, did one of my hard drives fail? I remember with one of my old hard drives that was not in RAID setup, when it was about to die it gave me bad clusters but it was still somewhat usable. Is it possible for my hard drive to work fine one day and suddenly the next day die?

How should I go about fixing this if possible? If I use option "2. Destroy the striping Array ", then try to create a new Array, will all of my data be erased? If I try option "3. Hide the broken array and continue to boot" can it do more damage and what usually happens when using this option?

Is it possible to change the boot drive to the good hard drive then maybe I can recover part of my data because right now I think my PC is set up to boot from the bad hard drive.

 

Before doing anything too drastic, I would check your drive setup in BIOS first. Make sure its set to configure your drives as RAID as opposed to IDE (even if they're SATA drives). If necessary, reset your BIOS to factory defaults and start again. You'll need to check your particular BIOS documentation to see how this is set up in your particular case.

I thought I'd lost my data a couple of times but for whatever reason it was the BIOS that had lost the configuration. I reset it to configure as RAID and I was up and running again. I've now moved to a solid state drive for my OS (after one too many heart stopping moments with RAID 0) and not regretted it one bit.

Like Arie and Steve have pointed out, RAID 0 is far too risky to use for critical data.

 

Arie PM'd me and said I needed to reply to this thread.

When I have some time I will check my drive setup in BIOS first then I will use SeaTools for DOS.

Is there any kind of software that I can use to recover some of my data?

If a RAID Array gets broken but both drives are still good is it possible to fix the RAID Array and recover the data? Or is it once the array is broken all your data is lost?

 

See my post above. If the drives are still good, then its probably the configuration that's gone and you need to reset it or replace the actual hardware that's failed. If one of the drives has actually failed, then you've probably had it - sorry.

See more information here.