**Please do not tell me to buy an external.. I know**

Ok heres the deal.. I got home from work tonight and was removing my storage drive..Shut the system down and popped out the drive.

Started the system back up and...... "Disk read error"........NOOO!!!

So I did the usual.. changed cabling.. reset cmos and the likes.. Nothing worked.. Now im pissed... Hooked up 2nd raid drive.. "Please insert boot blah blah" Hooked disk one back up with same cables.. "Disk Read Error"

So I have a dead HD..!!Not the worst thing that could happen.. meh whatever..

So I started reinstalling.. and me being me.. I have Vista ISO'ed up on my storage drive with SP slipstreamed..I install XP first slipped with SP2.. and do the complete install of Vista..

I know wrong.. but thats how I do it.

I get to the XP screen to select partition.. and of course what do I do.. delete the ****ing partition on my storage drive!!! Damnit twice now..!!

So needless to say I just lost about 300gig worth of porn and such .... j/k it was all stuff I can get back but still WTF!!

Ok im done.

/rant

On a side note.. Once I got into XP... I hooked the 2nd raptor back up.. and its in disk management.. was able to delete partitions and format it.. its usable again. So what happened?

You were able to reinstall without any problems on the same drive? Edit: Never mind, I saw that you actually had two drives. I'm not sure what happened, but were they in some kind of RAID configuration? (You referred to them as RAID drives).

Nah I did the reinstall on the 2nd raptor. Than once back on the desktop.. I went into disk management and the dead one was there. So I deleted the partitions on it and formatted it..

Able to store files on it not... Just reallllllly weird. Im still mad.. I lost alot of data lol

Any have any ideas as to what may have caused this?

I am assuming they were in raid 0.

Correct me if I am missing something but, in order to boot up your computer and access programs, etc. both hard drives need to be present if they are in a raid 0 configuration. Raid 0 works by distributing files between the two drives, so if only one of them is present you have literally half of your data, in fragments, making it impossible to boot.

I have had similar problems before with an WD drive in my wife's machine. Drive crapped out, ended up being able to reformat and reinstall. 2 months later, same problem. I believe it to be some flakey sectors in the area where it stores the boot files. Drive works fine as a storage drive, just buggs up every couple months as a boot disk.

They were in raid.. nothing changed with the raid at all.. the storage drive was a 3rd drive.

When I pulled the 3rd drive and rebooted with the 2 raptors hooked up I got the disk read error..

Hooked up the 2nd raptor solo and it said please insert boot..

Hooked the 1st raptor up solo and it said disk read error.

Hooked them both up in the same original config.. disk read error.. switched all the cabling around with no success.

Yea think im gonna wait for the 300g raptors to drop in price and grab one for a storage.. and use the good 74gig for boot.