SATA Drives Disappearing - NEED HELP!!!

[jhudson1977]

Alright, here is my story. Hopefully, someone out there might have something else I haven't tried yet.

While I was away on a trip, my wife called and said the computer was making a strange noise. I had her look inside the case through the plexiglass on the side. She mentioned the fan on the CPU wasn't running. I told her to shut it (the computer) off and I would look at it the next day when I came home.

I get home, confirm the fan wasn't running, take the fan and heat sink off the CPU, took it all apart, did a little clean up, everything was fine. Turn the computer back on and the screen was black - absolutely no input. So, I took the AGP card out (Radeon 9800), didn't find anything wrong with it and called it dead. The next day, I was getting ready to head down to my local computer store to get a new AGP and I said, "Aw, what the heck", plugged the AGP back in, and it worked.

So, then, (problems travel in three you know), as the computer was booting up, it got past the RAID setup screen when the Windows splash screen normally comes up, and the screen is just black. Windows never loads. My RAID setup screen sees the drives but it seems that Windows does not. I tried going into Safe Mode and booting to command prompt (and all the other options there) and it gets to the first five things it loads and hangs presumably forever at the system.log file.

So, I threw in the Win XP Pro disk. Go to the repair console and it comes up to my IDE hard drive in non-RAID format. Nothing seems to be seeing my SATA hard drives. I re-loaded the drivers for it, nothing. BIOS settings are correct (they never changed from before, but checked them anyways). For the life of me, I can't figure this one out. It seems as if Windows, won't recognize the RAID 0 SATA Western Digital HDDs. I did the whole F6 load drivers for it, that didn't work.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, I'm at the point now where I have no clue what to do next. If I have to reformat and start over, is there a data recovery tool to get my wife's (she doesn't listen to me to back things up) iTunes music and some other data off of there? I would regularly use SpinRite, but not sure if that would work on RAID drives. Can they be put into an external case and get data off of them one at a time?

[Gecko]

Hello jhudson1977, welcome to our forum.

I have seen something like this before, I think it was corrupted partition tables but not sure.
I was able to recover everything off the two raid 0 sata drives.

What I did was use with the plug-in to make a bootable CD.
Next you will need a place to recover to I used a network drive but you could use an extra ide hdd.

Create the bootable CD following the directions on the site.
Once the system boots to Bart's navigate the menu to GetDataBack for NTFS and follow the onscreen instructions.

[jhudson1977]

Thank you Gecko for the warm greeting and the information. I will definately give this a try tonight. Hopefully it will pull through for me. If anyone else has any other information that might be of some use I will gladly give it a try because I am at my complete wits end.

Thanks again Gecko. I will respond as soon as I have the results of that.

[jhudson1977]

Well, I guess that BartPE did nothing more than tell me what I already knew, only in a GUI. I will keep it handy though as I feel it will become important as soon as I can figure out how to get my computer to "see" those two hard drives.

The more I work on this the more I think that something isn't getting through the motherboard. I've loaded the drivers, updated the BIOS, but both Windows and BartPE would not see the RAID 0 SATA hard drives.

The thing that baffles me is that the RAID setup utility (where you hit Ctrl-I at start up) sees the two drives - just OS's don't.

So, I guess my last ditch effort is to hook up the drives with a SATA to IDE connector and/or get a SATA external case and hook them up one at a time via USB and HOPE that I can extract the information off of those. My biggest worry is the RAID 0 part.

How will extracting data off of one drive at a time work for me if the drives were in RAID 0 and now I will hook them up one at a time?

[Gecko]

[jhudson1977]

[Gecko]

jhudson1977,

Glad to hear that you can see the drives now in Bart's

I would say at this point to try a repair install (in place upgrade) of windows on top of itself.
Boot from your xp cd do the F^ thing then you will receive the following message on the Welcome to Setup screen:
This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer:
To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.
To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.
To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.

Press ENTER to set up Windows XP.

Press F8 to agree to the license agreement and make sure that your current installation of Windows XP is selected in the box.
Then press R to repair Windows XP follow the instructions that appear on the screen to reinstall Windows XP.
After you repair Windows XP, you may have to reactivate your copy of Windows XP but all her files should still be intact.

At this point I would backup all her files and then do a clean install of windows XP

[icecube]

Just a guess here. I ghost a lot of images. and if you boot two imaged drives together and both have valid O/S on both, windows will deactivate the second HD's boot partition and that will never boot when moved to a new system. But if you can get into the drive with the fdisk command you can set that drive to active and the system will then boot.

With a Raid 0, I am not sure about which drive should be set as active. it might be worth a look.

I would avoid a raid 0. Its only a matter of time before you loose everything. Your odds of drive failure are twice as great with two drives.

With the added speed of the Sata drives, a Raid 1 (Mirror) makes a lot of sense.