Both drives will not load windows now, either individually or in raid. Thought it was the raid controller so I moved it to the secondary raid controller on the board, still no go. If I take a completely different SATA drive it will load windows fine. Is it possible that once the raid 0 broke it completely jacked the two drives or will a low level format using seagate tools maybe resurrect them?

Also I've been doing quick formats on them instead of the full format, Would that make a difference?


Using Winxp pro 32bit.

You will need to reformat the drives to use them again, either seperate or in a raid config. Many motherboards use two different raid controllers so switching them is not possible.
Hope you didn't have any important info on the drives.

and now you know why we tell people that's it's pretty foolish to use raid 0 as your boot drive.

Nonsense! I have used RAID 0 as my boot disk for ten years. I have never lost a disk. Even if I do, I have my ghost backup. On the other hand for ten years now I enjoy the double data rate RAID 0 offers. But your documents and other data should be on RAID 1.

RAID or not, without a backup, you loose. A RAID-0 does not increase a lot your chance of failure. Hard drive are designed to last 5 years at least. You get a bad drive, you loose your information whatever it RAIDed or not.

I have external backup and on-line backup. So if my RAID fail or my house burn, my data are safe.

Coverfire,
I get the feeling you had no idea how raid 0 works when you set that up before. Of course none of the drives will load windows on their own, even if the array was not broken. The data is written across the 2 drives in a way that requires them both to be present to work properly, this means that you always face an increased risk(2x) of data loss compared to using a single drive.
So just like these guys are saying, you should not be surprised if this happens with such a setup and it's foolish to use it for anything other than your OS installation(important data should be placed on another drive, preferably on a redundant array such as raid 1,5). You should also make backup images of the array so you can restore it if this ever happens again(don't let it slip your mind that it's more likely than not that it will happen again).

OP: Are you using RAID-0 or RAID-1?

I think number one culprit of broken raid 0 arrays is, people opening their computer cases to do some modification, then closing it without checking if they have accidentally dislodged any sata data or power connector. I think one should check and double check all sata connectors before closing the case cover

perhaps I should clarify, I know how raid 0 works and I do not ever keep important information my computer (its strictly for gaming) I have other computers with redundant arrays in them for important files and such. For my gaming computer I just go for performance.

When I do the windowsXP pro install from the CD I have set my bios to recognize the drive as a single SATA drive as opposed to the raid configuration that I had. At that point when I install windows I do not need to load the F6 raid drivers since it is recognized as a single drive on the Nvidia SATA controller. I have tried it on the NVraid controller and the Sil3114 controller as single drive and when I get to the point to delete the partition and create a new one it then prompts for NTFS full format or quick, I choose quick and at about 3% the system completely shuts off and this happens with either drive using either controller and different SATA cables. I also had a spare SATA drive that was never in the system just laying around for testing, I popped that into the system and I can load windows fine from either controller with no crashes.

My question I suppose at this point is, is it possible that when RAID 0 crashed it completely and utterly broke my seagate drives or if I do a full format or run a low level format using seagate tools can I resurrect the drives? especially since a completely different SATA drive works perfectly fine in the computer.


One more thing for the full story. Bios battery had died, replaced with new which would obviously have reset all the bios options. Hence when I initially could get into windows it would crash with a message that a critical raid file was corrupt and needed to be replaced. I replaced the file but the system still crashed. At that point I reformatted and have been having problems since.

Ok, if you have 1 drive and it fails, you lose everything. So if you have raid 0 and a drive fails, you lose everything... what’s the difference (other then the speed gains from raid 0).

The question is can it irrevocably damage the drives if the raid fails. should have just said that from the beginning for the love of god.

Worked/built on computers for 15+ years. Although maybe I'm not nerdy enough to get the point across to some of you sheesh

I had this same problem occur about 6 months back. I am not sure what happened to the drives. Maybe lighting did it...don't know. But, after I low level formatted them them seemed ok. I left them overnight and came back to do the installation (good thing I had my acronis Image to all you nay-sayers....all you just need to shut up!). When i checked the disks, one would not show up at all in my BIOS or my RAID BIOS!. So I contacted Seagate for an RMA for that one. Later that day the other one died too! I had to RMA both of them. Six months later the replacements are running fine. My drives were twin Seagate 7200.10 series 80Gb SATA2 drives running on an NForce 4 Ultra chipset. I hope your drives end up ok otherwise you will have to pay to ship them back. Seagate did not offer to pay for shipping but there RMA service is pretty painless overall and the turnaround time is short. You should get your drives within two weeks for sure (total time).

The only issue I have right now is one of my cables backs itself out slowly and then I have a raid failure. I am looking to two more HD to either add into my RAID 0 (I will reinstall), or create a raid 5 (again, reinstall).

I don't see how the AID0 array failing would have killed the drives. Perhaps the drives died, causing the array to fail. At this point, you have nothing to loose. The motherboard works, as proved by the third drive. Quick formats didn't work, try the full. If that doesn't work, try loading into windows with the third disk, and formatting them from there. If you STILL can't load an array onto them, they are probably dead. Quick question, can you load a windows build onto ONE of them? (I'm not sure, I think you said you tried that and it didn't work.)

Because AID0 adds more possible points of failure. Not only do you run the risk that either of the two drives might be a dud, but you also run the risk of losing your AID0 driver. This is the most common form of failure that I see. If you lose your AID0 driver, then you have to reformat the array, which you might not had to do if you were running just a single drive.

Add the fact that AID0 does nearly nothing for gaming, and I see no reason to run it on a gaming computer like the OP has. But I don't want to thread hijack this, so lets stick to the problem at hand.

The difference is if you have n drives (and obviously we're talking about multi-drive systems, since we're talking of a RAID system) in a non-RAID configuration and one fails, you lose 1/n of your stuff. If your controller (motherboard) dies, you can remove your drives and easily port them to another machine or external enclosure to recover your files.

If you've got a RAID-0 array, and you lose ANY drive, you'll lose 100% of your stuff. If your controller dies and you can't get a matching one, you'll lose all your stuff.

Clint

I have tried both drives individually with the same results of a crash. Currently trying a full format, we'll see how that goes. Last resort is a hard drive nuke/low level format to see if that will clear the MBR.

What's the difference? If you have 2 drives in the array, you've doubled your chances of catastrophic data loss. Got a 3 drive array? Ha... you've tripled it. That's a serious drawback to RAID 0 as far as I'm concerned.

Everyone says that is a drawback, but it isn’t. We are all computer users, and as a computer user we know all systems will fail. How do we combat this? BACKUP. Backup all files that are of any importance and or have them saved to another drive (either a single internal or external). There are lots of media that you could save files to so you have backups.

My point is, if you are a responsible user, you will have backups of the files you need. As long as you have files that you need, what do you have to lose? Raid 0 give you better load times. I do not like to wait, so the faster I can run... load... the better.

What is the average lifespan of a hard drive. Is it something you should worry about? To me, the lifespan of a hard drive is longer then I will have my PC for. I rebuild every 3-4 years, and if I have a failure before the, then I replace the part and start over.


Now let’s talk about standard users. If a normal consumer buys a PC and then their windows crashes, they normally will just pop in the "recovery" CD. All this does is reformat and then reinstall. They have 1 hard drive and have the same outcome as someone with a raid 0. If they are smart, then they will place the HD into another PC and then get the files off that they need. But you are giving to much credit to the people who don't understand that the power button on the monitor does not turn on the PC.


I am looking to move to raid 5, at least 4 drives. Why, you get speed increases and you get redundancy so if a drive fails, you put a new one in and it rebuild that HD.