WinXP SP2 keeps rebooting itself on RAID array

[kal123]

I'm in really bad shape.

Sys info: Running WinXP SP2, FastTrak100, RAID0, 2x75GB WD drives and a WD IDE drive on an Asus P4C mobo

I wanted to leverage the speed of the RAID so I installed WinXP on the array (instead of the IDE drive connected to the mobo). Worked great for months but lately my boot times have been getting slower and slower even after defragging.

A few hours ago I booted up and got the progess bar on the bottom of the screen...goes to 25%...then after a couple long mins the WinXP logo appears...the progress bar bounces left to right a few times and then boom, the PC resets and reboots.

I tried installing a new copy of XP on the mobo IDE drive and using it as the system drive. When I open my computer i see the raid drives (d: and e:) but I can't open them. "D:\ is not accessible". Then it disappears. Nothing in disk manager either.

So I can't get to them from using the IDE drive and if I boot off the RAID I get the partial start-reset cycle over and over.

Please help - I have some very personal data that I really can't afford to lose. :(((((((

[Reloadron]

First and foremost Welcome To The HL Forums!

OK, let me ask a few questions that may help myself or others who try to help you.

When you did the second install of Windows to the IDE drive did you install the RAID drivers for your motherboard, meaning load those drivers following the F6 prompt? The reason I ask is because you refer to the D:\ and E:\ drives as RAID and unless you set them up as D & E with a partition they should show as a single drive.

Next, have you tried booting in Safe Mode to the problem drives?

Have you tried booting from your Windows CD and using the recovery console?

Ron

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

A little of that information makes me feel one of your drives has failed/is failing, but that may not be true.

Like Reload said, first try booting from safe mode. And when you install, press F6 to load your drivers from a floppy.

[kal123]

Thanks for the replies :)

Yep, when I did the clean install on the single IDE drive I used the Promise drivers for the RAID and all went normally. The part that worries me is that during setup when it asked me where it wanted me to install XP, the 2 RAID drives showed up as "unknown partitions" with ":-", i.e., no drive letters, and showed their total capacities, not remaining. IIRC when I have installed in the past the drives showed as something else (can't remember) and showed the correct sizes. BTW - before this all happened I had setup two partitions on the logical RAID volume so that is why 2 showed up.

I can't (nor have I ever been able to) boot from CD for whatever reason so I've always had to boot from floppy. What a pain. :(

The Promise array seems to be healthy from the BIOS point of view, i.e., I can use ctrl-f during POST and use the Promise menu to view the array. I've tried hitting f8 when the XP progress bar shows up but it goes to the XP logo for a min and then reboots. So I'm not sure what's going on there.....

The drives are formatted NTFS (something I used to never do - always went FAT32 so I could get to it using DOS - now I'm regretting it) Is there any way to get to the array by booting DOS? I just need to get the data off of them.

I'm guessing the physical array is ok but obviously could be wrong. I'm wondering if the reason I can't access the drives when I boot from the IDE drive is because of the fact both drives have a c:\windows on them? Is there a boot.ini I can edit? Of course, to do that I'd have to get to the drives in the array, which I can't. :(

[kal123]

Originally Posted by wtcnbrwndo4u

A little of that information makes me feel one of your drives has failed/is failing, but that may not be true.

Like Reload said, first try booting from safe mode. And when you install, press F6 to load your drivers from a floppy.

SIGH. It looks like you may have been right. Now the array is broken. It shows one drive still in array status and the other one is "free". I tried booting with each one separately....

Drive 1 - shows up as array offline but it is still tagged as "array"
Drive 2 - shows up as no array and says it is free

If the drive failed I would assume it wouldn't show at all, so is this a promise issue? Am I totally screwed? This is really, really bad. I just ordered a USB (500GB) drive for backup purposes although dollar late, dollar short.

Is there a RAID recovery service/company that you can recommend?

[kal123]

I also wonder if I can try another promise controller. I found a 100 TX2 on ebay for $10, although mine is just a 100. Would that be worth a shot? The service I called - DriveSavers - quoted me anywhere from $800 to $5K....that is going to crush me. What a terrible, terrible day.

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

There's a company named OnTrack that recovers data from drives, but it's a costly run (so it better be worth it). They've recovered data from hard drives with bullet holes in them. Check them out for a quote.
Data Recovery | Email Data Recovery by Ontrack

I've used a freeware app called PhotoRec when I accidentally deleted the partition on my hard drive. It supports most multimedia formats, such as mp3, avi, mpg, jpg, png, etc. It even supports doc, exe, zip, a few others too. Long list. I don't know if it'll help on a failed drive though. My only gripe about this program is that it can't save filenames, but at least I got my data back.

[kal123]

Thanks... I actually found another interesting solution for $69 called RAIDReconstructor. Data Recovery Software - File System Utilities

Looks like it's worth a shot before spending $$$$ on a service.

[Reloadron]

Keep us informed as to how it goes. BTW, what type array was it? I may have missed that.

Ron

[kal123]

Will do....Promise Fasttrak 100, RAID0, 2x75GB WD 800JB drives. Ordered a 500GB WD external usb drive mybook premium se so that I can use the above tool to copy the raid images onto that drive and then extract the data.