How to recover from RAID 0 Failure

Hi guys,

I have just experienced my first blue screen crash in Vista64 while performing some dvd duplication . After the PC rebooted, it could not find the hard drives.

Going into the Intel Matrix Storage Manager it had the RAID Volume as such:

ID-0
Name - RAID0
Level - RAID0 (STRIPE)
STRIP - 128kb
Size - 931.5GB
Status - FAILED
Bootable - NO

I've read several threads around here and elsewhere to perform the deletion of the RAID Volume and re-creating the RAID volume as it was. Now status is detected as normal and bootable. Yet no hard drive is detected after a system reboot.

I've also booted with Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic program and ran both short and long tests and both hard drives passed the tests. Am I wrong to believe that my data is still present? Or at the very least the hard drives aren't damaged in any way?

I'm at a loss as how next to proceed and as one can see, I am completely clueless about this so if anyone can take the time to guide me through this issue and anyone else who could provide tips, advice and suggestions to avoid this situation in the future, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
paptimus

Just thought I'd mention my RAID 0 worked great for a year on a dual boot system mainly using XP.

one day I booted up with Vista after about 1 hour it notified me of a RAID controller problem and comp would not boot up after that both drives are working fine on their own.

Could Vista be causing RAID probs?????

the only way I know of (there may be ways I dont know of) is to send BOTH hdd's off to a data recovery service where they can attempt to recover the data. Not cheap. probably more reliable than some other methods that may exist.

If you have done this, your data is most likely gone. Once you break/delete the array, the data is gone. Format the drives, remake the array, continue on.

I'd like to point out now something I've been trying to point out for awhile. First, this is the reason I call it AID0. There is no redundancy, you might as well drop the R. Second, in a two disk AID0 array, you have 3 points of failure, not two. One for each harddrive, and a third for the drivers. What the OP is describing here is what I hear most people complain about, not dying drives.

Thanks for your responses guys!

Popped in my Vista64 disc, ran the system repair utility, heck it even detected the drive/system as Unknown but it got the job done! Nothing lost, just as I've left it. This after deleting the raid volume not once but twice! I'm even grabbing a copy of SP1 update (for better or worse!).

On a more serious note however, any suggestions or recommendations on backup methods? Would external drives suffice or are there other or better alternatives?

Thanks again!

Well if you just bought a single drive, doesnt have to be fast, you could simply copy and store files and programs on it without it even being used, so if the raid array fails you can copy it back on there right away.

Wouldnt ever reccomend raid0 for an OS though.