Recovering data from marginal Raid drive on Sata system

[basmntdweller]

Hello,
I have a PC that had it's sole HD set up as a RAID. It is a Dell Studio XPS. The drive began faulting so I bought a new drive and tried to copy from the old drive to the new one but the old HD was too far gone. I saw no reason to set up the new drive as a RAID so I pulled the old HD and loaded Win7 from original CD. I just tried to install the old drive to recover data from it but now my system will only recognize one of the disks at a time depending whether the SATA setting in BIOS is set to SATA or RAID. I can't read the old HD while the BIOS is set for SATA and I can't boot while the BIOS is set to RAID.
Any Ideas??
thanks, Matt

 

[basmntdweller]

I am not wanting to spend a chunk of cash for software to recover the data. I thought that if there was a way to have both the old RAID drive in the system while booting from the SATA drive, I would likely be able to recover some of the data as the RAID drive isn't completely dead yet. I think only portions of the drive are unreadable.
Would it be possible to read it if I connected it through a USB drive adapter? That way I can not plug it in until after windows is up and running so the BIOS doesn't see it when booting up.

Thanks, Matt

 

[chrisy5002]

Hmm, I find it interesting that you say that you had one "sole HD" in raid. Have you partitioned the HD and then put it in raid. Having one HD in raid makes little to no sense. Could you elaborate further on system spescs?

Regards,

Bodge

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Chrisy is right,

Raid requires 2 or more drives. you could just have a failed drive

 

[basmntdweller]

Sorry didn't get back sooner, been really busy last couple days.
I ordered the PC from Dell back in March of 2010. I may have requested Raid setup but never bought the second HD as I may not have wanted to pay Dell's price. I really don't remember what happened or how I ended up with a single HD setup as a RAID but that was the case. Only one HD in the box when new.
Ideally, I would like to be able to connect the bad drive to my current setup which is a single drive set to SATA and attempt to retrieve some of my old pics, music and docs. I know I failed miserably at maintaining a proper back up, especially since I have a nice 500G portable drive that was bought just for this purpose even before I bought this PC!
As I said in my OP, my BIOS won't allow both a RAID drive and a SATA drive active within the system. I can only boot to my SATA HD so what are my options as far as connecting/reading the old HD?

Thanks, Matt

 

[basmntdweller]

ttt

 

[basmntdweller]

Anyone? Bueller, Bueller?