Win7 System no longer booting from 2 disk RAID0 array.

Helter Incendito

Honorable
Jun 6, 2013
2
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10,510
My son switched on the computer tonight and received a message urging him to insert a bootable device. The BIOS didn't even detect any drives in the computer.
I had a look in the RAID setup and found that there were no disks showing in the array any longer. I tried the obvious and re-seated the cables at both ends but with no joy so I decided to take the disks out and hook them up to my laptop using a USB dock. The disks were detected but my laptop wanted to initialize the disks before I could have a look at them. I didn't let it because I want to keep the build on these disks as there's about 300 gig of installed games and other software as well as a lot of files (these are mostly backed up).
I know it can be reinstalled but almost all of the games were download installs and neither I nor my ISP want me to have to sit through all that again ;)
I plugged the drives back into my PC and lo and behold, there were my drives, detected in the system again but of course not in a raid array. Adding the disks to a new array threatens to wipe the contents so I haven't done that yet.
Does anyone know of a way to rebuild the array AND retain the current image on the disks? I have read about software I can install to restore the data but presumably this assumes that the computer can be booted up in the first place, or does it? I should add that this is (was) as Win7 x64 system and that I can't for the life of me find the serial key for the OS.
 
Solution
The RAID is probably corrupted or damaged. Most likely you cannot recover the data. I advise against RAID arrays for system disks.

You should be able to get a new key for the OS from Microsoft. Check their site.