RAID0 Error Occurred

[SWIPDAMED]

I have had a working RAID0 on my PC (2x250g WD 2500KS, Asus p5ld2 deluxe MD) for 6 months or so. Yesterday after a reboot XP failed to load and I noticed ont he second reboot the RAID configuration software noted that one of the two drives showed Error Occurrd. Interestingly I was able to boot into safe mode (does this mean the drive is alright and not dead?). Thinking this might be an old BIOS issue, I flashed the bios with the newest update. This then had me reinstall the RAID drivers in Windows (still in safe mode no boot to XP) to no avail. If I switch the SATA cables between the two drives (leave same ports on the MB) the bad drive switches ports (assuming this means it is a drive issue then?).

My current thought is that perhaps the file allocation table for this drive is messed up and not letting windows find what it needs (partially think this because when I select boot in safe mode I get a long list of windows drivers that pop up on the screen, and also the NTFS.sys (and a couple of other .SYS files), does this mean it can't find those files?
Win XP can't reinstall/repair either, the setup claims there are no harddrives attached.

Has anyone experienced soemthing like this, any ideas on how to repair this without re-creating the raid or reformatting (I'm trying to avoid this for time considerations even though I have the data backed up to an external drvie)?
Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Pain]

You could probably have gone into the raid conf utility menu and forced the failed drive back on line, but at this point with everthing you've done, I personally would start from scratch and reload, especially since you have your data backed up.

 

[asdasd123123]

Seems likely its borked, anyway you shouldn't actually make raid 0 on large drives like that, especially if they're "vanilla" drives, there's several makers that make raid-specific drives with extra warranty and better parts..
(In that size range, not talking about raptors)

 

[Pain]

I'd be more inclinded to say one should use a better controller than to say use different drives, but in either case, yeah.

 

[asdasd123123]

I'd be more inclinded to say one should use a better controller than to say use different drives, but in either case, yeah.

Seems likely he's talking about a SMART-error, and they haven't been wrong for me so far, so I'd say the drive is bust anyway..

 

[SWIPDAMED]

Thanks for responding. So it seems the general consensus is that the RAID is screwed and that the drive may be as well...in a RAID0 do the safe mode components of XP end up on the same drive then and I got lucky to be able to boot to safe mode and the drive may actually be bad?

 

[Pain]

The way raid works is that files get striped, and only data larger than a certain block size gets written to the second disk. If all the files are small, they will end up only on one disk. But, that block size is typically 16-64K by default [can be changed] so I can't see all of the OS being on one disk.

With that said, I doubt its a disk error, but you never know.

 

[SWIPDAMED]

Ended up the RAID was just screwed, but i couldn't force it back online and ended up losing the data. So I'm up and running after a reformat and fresh install (no RAID this time, not really what I wanted to start with but someone else set it up for me). Thanks for the help guys.