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RAID 0 array drives and a failed motherboard

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Hi,

I've been looking around for the past several days for an answer to my question and haven't found an exact match. Any knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

My problem is that the motherboard on my computer is presumably dead. (No BIOS boot, no error code beeps, power is seen to flow to mobo as indicated by a light on it, and no display.) It just sits there like a turd. I've had this computer for about 4 years now, and never noticed until now that it was preconfigured as an IDE RAID 0 array. It's a VPR Matrix FT-9100PE, one of those boxes briefly sold by Best Buy. It has two 100GB ATA Western Digital drives that appear as a single logical volume. In the past, none of the standard Win XP HD maintenance tools would work.

Working with the assumption that the mobo died, I'm torn on what to do. Do I have to find the same exact mobo (Intel D845PEBT2) and swap it out? Would that even work? Deets on this board indicate a SATA RAID controller, but the drives are definitely connected with regular old ATA cables. I have no reason to think there's anything wrong with the drives themselves. If I had the right RAID controller, would that be the only thing I'd need to perform a search of 'compatible' replacement motherboards, or am I stuck? I'm somewhat technical but my hardware skills have rusted somewhat in the past years.

There's financial data and years of music that I'd like to recover, and I feel retarded I never noticed the machine's configuration.


Any advice would be very awesome.


Thanks!

James

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Dude :) 

From your limited description I see only two choices:
1. Call 1-800-332-4800 VPR Matrix Tech Support or,
2. Send you drives off to a data recovery service (approx $1K/drive)

How much can you re-buy that board for?
Might find one under $100, that would give you the best chance to recover the data, that is if neither of the 2 drives have corrupted.
If so, you may need expert drive recovery services.
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i was curious about if a raid 0 would work taken out of a mobo and place in one exactly the same. mine are SATA but it worked! here is the story:

i was building a new comp for both my friend and myself. i built my friends first but his HDD was taking a while to come in so i hooked up my raid 0 and installed the OS. i later took the raid out of my friends case/system and plugged it into mine. i changed all applicable settings to my system could recognize the raid and i booted windows.

granted this was with SATA i have no experience with a regular ATA raid. but there may be hope for you yet!

Good Luck!

His RAID is integrated into the mobo, which died.
Yes, you can move a RAID card PCI controller to another machine with drives, and RAID will work.
In his case, he needs another mobo with exact RAID controller onboard.

Agreed, another mobo with the same RAID will work. Sometimes even different RAID cards will work if they are made by the same manufacturer (i.e. old adaptec ---> new adaptec, promise, lsi etc).

I encounted this on a failed Abit KD7. If I remember correctly the board had Promise Raid. I had another motherboard on hand that also ran Promise although it was different.

I contacted Promise and they said that they were compatible so I plugged them in and the raid system read the configuration from disk and I was back online.

Some raid systems work differently and store the raid config in NVRAM. In which case you may have to go into the raid configuration utility and RECREATE your array...ensuring you do not reinitialize the disks (as this will wipe the data) and ensuring that you recreate the array EXACTLY the way it was before--->Usually pretty easy if you are running 2 disks in RAID0, a little trickier if you have a 12 disk array with Raid 5 and Raid 1 sets.

Well, I ordered an Opt CPU which came DOA (didn't know it), installed it with a new HSF. Low and behold, motherboard fried instantly and before I could yank the plug out, my WD HD went to clicking like a madman. Everything in warranty but I lose shipping and time. So, basically, when the new MB arrives (today) I will be replacing the RAID setup and hopefully it will work fine. The HD that fried was the IDE BU drive, only drive plugged in at the time. If it won;t work, I did a BU just a few days ago.

Wow, I have the same issue. I have a 2.5 year old ASUS P4C800E-D MOBO that has been rock solid up to now. The other day I was upgrading to 2 GB RAM. To make a long story Etc, I had to clear the Cmos. I did the jumper thing and after that I could not get the BIOS to maintain settings. ASUS thinks I have a bad capacitor on my MOBO and they are going to replace it. My question was when I replace the MOBO with the excat same one, ronning my RAID off the ICH5R just as I am doing now will I have to reload the OS and apps or will the new MOBO just recognize the RAID.
I do have a seperate data drive and all my data backed up but I would rather not have to reload the OS and all my apps and settings Etc.

Any comments or experience with this? Thanks in advance.

In some cases the replacement motherboard is a newer revision which has an incompatible RAID controller. :( 

Hopefully it will recognize the array and read all the settings off the drives. If the settings are stored in the CMOS then you will have to remember the exact settings you used.

Thats why I stick with RAID 1 with motherboard controllers. If something goes wrong I get two drives that each have a copy of all my data fully readable by a non-RAID controller.

Some recovery softare claims to reconstruct raid drives. You connect them to a regular controller and the software tried to figure out the RAID settings and then reconstruct the data.

Never tried it myself, but it would be cheaper than sending the drives to a lab and the recovery programs are non-destructive (that make no changes to the drive so they don't ruin chances of further recovery).

Here is one such program which is free to try (though it will let you see the recovery results I am guessing it will not let you save then unless you buy the full version).
http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm
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