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General discussion

My raid 0 system crashed.

May 30, 2006 6:36AM PDT

I had to order a restoral disk. I was never aware that I had a raid system, I didn't even know what raid was.The restoral disk fixed my system but now I have only one 120 gig hard drive. I assume that my system has been operating as a regular computer and one of my drives is dead. What happens if I add another drive, I need more space. If I replace the dead drive, will my system try to reconfigure? Could I lose all my data again?

Discussion is locked

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For starters ....see what CONTROLLER the drive is
May 30, 2006 12:09PM PDT

connected to !

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Re: My Computer crashed...
May 31, 2006 6:01AM PDT

Looking in the Bios, Primary IDE and Slave aere not detected. THE IDE controller is set to BOTH. UPON STARTUP THE MESSAGE IS FLASHING "2+0 STRIPE IS OFFLINE", however, the computer starts and runs fine. The device manager lists the disk drive as, Promise 1+0 Span scsi device, and under Properties for this drive the 2 boxes (disable tagged queing, and Disable synchronous transfers) are both unchecked. So, what will happen if I replace the dead drive?
JDD

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You need to go here to read about RAID
May 31, 2006 11:51AM PDT
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=RAID+0&btnG=Google+Search

The bad news about RAID 0 is ....

The failure of just one drive will result in all data in an array being lost.

What you really need to decide is whether continue with RAID (I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS OPTION) or go with a more conventional setup where you can dramatically the reduce the risk of data loss and be better prepared if a drive happens to die.
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Re: Go read...
Jun 1, 2006 3:10PM PDT

I have read the exact links several times but still the question that I am asking is, since my raid crashed before I knew anything about raid, I used a restoral disk that restored the system, however, I don't know how the remaining drive is configured. How do I replace the dead drive without running the risk of losing the data that is on the remaining disk. I agree that the raid array is not the way that I want to configure the system with the new drive. Should I just set the new drive to slave and the old remaining drive to master? Like I said before, the primary master and primary slave are not even listed as detected in the bios. I'm sorry if I'm having a hard time explaining exactly what my delimma is, as it may not be a delimma at all but I don't want to lose my data and I need to add space.
JDD

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Unless I misunderstood the scenario...your data was gone
Jun 2, 2006 12:25PM PDT

with the failure of the first drive

Like I said before ..... he bad news about RAID 0 is and I quote...."The failure of just one drive will result in all data in an array being lost."

You indicated one drive died and you restored the OS to the working drive.

Sorry for the bad news ...perhaps someone else will see a solution I missed.

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(NT) Re: Be aware...
Jun 2, 2006 4:53PM PDT

I do really appreciate your patience. Maybe the only thing I haven't made clear is that it was about 2 years ago when the system crashed and it was then when I restored it, never realizing that Raid was more than a bug spray, so now I have 110 gig of data that I have accumulated since then I'm trying not to lose as I add another drive to replace the dead one that has been sitting in the system for 2 years doing nothing. The remaining working drive is connected to the primary socket on the motherboard which is labeled pri raid. Also, I did get into the raid controller program at startup and found that the 'array 2' is set to 'span' mode. I guess that since I don't really understand the redundancy factor of the span mode, I don't know what is going to happen when I try to add another drive. It looks to me like the motherboard is not going to allow me to add any drive unless it is hooked up to the raid controller, however, from what I have read, maybe I could configure the new drive in a separate array or logical drive as added storage. Does that make any sense? Please don't give up on me, you may be the only hope I have left.
Thanks,
JDD

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(NT) Re: My computer crashed...
May 31, 2006 6:07AM PDT

The only controller listed in the device manager is WIN XP Promise Fast track 100 Controller.
JDD