Vista - Hard drive failure

Hey
I recently upgraded my computer and added a raid 0 array with two 250gb
drives which is running the OS. I've got six SATA ports and theyre plugged
into the first two which are marked as 'master' and ive plugged my old non
raid drive into the slave sata port and it just operated as a storage drive.
Originally this configuration worked fine but now my motherboard wont even
detect it even when ive tried moving the connections around. It wont work on
any other computers sata connections either. So i think it may have
failed...but im not sure. Help would be appreciated. If it has indeed
failed...is there anyway to recover the data? theres a few important things i
want off there. I'm running windows vista and using an ASUS P5B-Plus vista
edition motherboard. The hdds are seagate...

If only computers were stable.....grrr
anyhow if anyones got any clues dont hesitate

"Hugh Mortensen" <HughMortensen@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4FA0136B-4E31-4115-9B5F-7682C868977D@microsoft.com...
> Hey
> I recently upgraded my computer and added a raid 0 array with two 250gb
> drives which is running the OS. I've got six SATA ports and theyre plugged
> into the first two which are marked as 'master' and ive plugged my old non
> raid drive into the slave sata port and it just operated as a storage
> drive.
> Originally this configuration worked fine but now my motherboard wont even
> detect it even when ive tried moving the connections around. It wont work
> on
> any other computers sata connections either. So i think it may have
> failed...but im not sure. Help would be appreciated. If it has indeed
> failed...is there anyway to recover the data? theres a few important
> things i
> want off there. I'm running windows vista and using an ASUS P5B-Plus vista
> edition motherboard. The hdds are seagate...
>
> If only computers were stable.....grrr
> anyhow if anyones got any clues dont hesitate
>
Seagate give a 5 year warranty. Ring them.

--
John the West Ham fan
housetrained@hotmail.com
<><

Hugh,

I have the same motherboard and some suggestions.
Firstly there is a BIOS setting which allows you to select what mode the
Intel Storage chip operates in, the options (from memory) are either IDE or
AHCI. As I understand RAID will not work in IDE emulation mode so check that
it is set to AHCI.
Secondly make sure you have the Intel INF files installed and also the Intel
Matrix Storage Manager (both available from either Asus's Support area or
Intel's website).

Be warned that if your boot disk is SATA then swapping from IDE to AHCI is
likely to cause problems booting Windows as the driver for the primary boot
device will no longer be the correct one. Under XP there was a cheat to get
round this, I think it should still work:
1) Attach your SATA boot disk to the secondry storage controller (the
JMicron chip, for which the port is located near the PCI-E slots) and make
sure this is set to IDE mode in the JMicron option BIOS.
2) Attach your RAID drives to the primary controller and set the BIOS
setting to AHCI.
3) Boot to Windows, Vista should install the AHCI drivers and recognise your
RAID array.
4) Shutdown, now reattach your boot disk to the primary controller.
5) Boot Windows again, because the driver for AHCI was installed in the
previous boot, you should now have no problems in booting Windows and all
drives will be operating in AHCI mode.

Hope that was of some help.
Seb.


"housetrained" wrote:

> "Hugh Mortensen" <HughMortensen@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:4FA0136B-4E31-4115-9B5F-7682C868977D@microsoft.com...
> > Hey
> > I recently upgraded my computer and added a raid 0 array with two 250gb
> > drives which is running the OS. I've got six SATA ports and theyre plugged
> > into the first two which are marked as 'master' and ive plugged my old non
> > raid drive into the slave sata port and it just operated as a storage
> > drive.
> > Originally this configuration worked fine but now my motherboard wont even
> > detect it even when ive tried moving the connections around. It wont work
> > on
> > any other computers sata connections either. So i think it may have
> > failed...but im not sure. Help would be appreciated. If it has indeed
> > failed...is there anyway to recover the data? theres a few important
> > things i
> > want off there. I'm running windows vista and using an ASUS P5B-Plus vista
> > edition motherboard. The hdds are seagate...
> >
> > If only computers were stable.....grrr
> > anyhow if anyones got any clues dont hesitate
> >
> Seagate give a 5 year warranty. Ring them.
>
> --
> John the West Ham fan
> housetrained@hotmail.com
> <><
>
>