RAID0(Stripe) PC reboots constantly

[Jonah82]

Its a Dell XPS with Raid0(Stripe)

It keeps rebooting and we are unable to stop it. We want to recover the data from the two drives in it. Is there anything we can do? We scanned the drive while connected to a SATA drive USB adapter but there seems to be little data accessible.
We have spent four hours getting the PC inbuilt diagnostic to to diagnostically scan the drives but no errors are apparent either.

As we cannot even get it to boot to SAfe Mode is there a utility that we could run from a USB floppy drive or a CD we could make to boot it and sort it?

Jonah and Andy

 

[WyomingKnott]

The second-stupidest thing that Dell ever did was ship consumer machines with RAID0. RAID0 is a tool for making a machine less reliable and harder to repair. The problem is that each file is spread across both drives, so a problem with either drive, or with their "alignment" (NOT the correct term), will cause all the data to be lost.

Sigh. There are utilities that can do a fairly good job of rebuilding broken RAID sets. Scanning one drive won't do you any good - only half of each file is there, only half of the directories. And RAID implementation is not standard so that you could just put them in another machine and put the RAID set back together.

This is a useless post in the sense that I can't point you to any of the utilities; someone with more experience will weigh in. I just wanted to try to make some of the issues clearer. One other thing: Do not allow anything to write to either of the drives; that will cause further damage.

(Drat the button that let me erase all my Favorites, with links to threads with answers for issues like these.) Look at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256783-32-solved-raid0-help , or search the forums for Recover Raid0. Best of luck to you.

Unasked-for advice: In the future, have external drives with a second copy of anything that you want to keep. >1 copy: survival. 1 copy: Large potential for loss.