Stripes raid bios.

[ally31]

I have a dell dimension 9100 with 2 x 150gb hard drives. They have been setup as raid0 striped. On boot they show as drive failure and 'Error loading operating system'. I'm not very experienced with raid - I'm aware it is possible all the data may be lost (unless by a data recovery company!)
Is it possible to wipe the drives and revert them back non raid - presuming one of them is still working.
There is an option on the raid setup screen which says 'revert to non raid drive. - what does this do to the drive and the setup. I want to be able to boot from an XP disc and do a clean install. Is this possible??
Or - Is it possible to recover the data?? Help please.

 

[Nelviticus]

Never say never, but it does sound as though one of the drives has failed in which case - because you have a RAID 0 set-up - your data is lost unless you want to pay a recovery company. That's the down-side of RAID 0, it's very vulnerable to drive failure.

'Revert to non-raid drive' should do exactly what it says. I don't have the same RAID hardware as you do but mine has an equivalent option which turns your RAID-ed drives into non-RAID ones, destroying any data on them in the process. If one of your drives is still working you should be able to get some storage space back.

Once you've done that you should be able to boot from an XP disc and set up your system from scratch, although you might need to have your RAID drivers available on a floppy disk. Even though you won't be using RAID the drive will still be attached to a RAID controller so XP setup may still need the drivers for it, depending on how your particular hardware works.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[ally31]

Thanks for that - Will be investigating cost of attempting data recovery first before a clean install. Thanks again Ally.