Is there any way to save my data?

[ReNeGaDe*]

Ok here's the dillyo. I was just messing around with ram timings in the bios for my MSI K8N Neo Platinum (latest 1.55b) and every few minutes I had to clear the cmos/turn it off and back on when it wouldn't post.

Then when I finally got it stable at 2.4GHz (it's an athlon 64 3000+) and run a few benchies, it was all cool. Then I shut my pc down to go eat. I come back, turn it on and for some reason my nforce ethernet thingy has disappeared from windows, so i re-download the drivers and install and restart. Now this time it keeps getting to the end of the bars on starting windows xp boot screen, but it keeps restarting, even though I've got it set to not restart on BSODs. So now I start fearing for my data. I've got 2 x 160GB SATA Hitachi Deskstars in a RAID0, on the standard nforce 250 chip. When i tried to restart in safe mode, it told me it couldn't find a347bus.sys and d347bus.sys.

I thought okay those are just alcohol120% files, so I'll go into repair install and put them back. Now this time, when I get to the command line thign on recovery console, it decides it won't read anythign from my C: drive (prolly because it's SATA and RAID0, both of which require drivers. SO then I resort to a reinstall. But now it wants to completely format my array, so I just cancel the install.

THEN when I try to start up normally again it says its got no OS to boot from. SO finally I try knoppix, but it can't even find my hard drives. NVraid thingy says my array is healthy, but nothing is detecting it.

Have I lost it all? I'm quite distressed right now, as I was planning on backing all 100GB of my stuff tomorrow Now I couldn't really care that much about my whole music collection archived on my pc or my amazing champ man games. What I really care is the 3 and a half years of work, that I've been transferring from PC to PC.

This is GCSE and A level stuff that I need. Theres about 10 2000-10000 word english courseworks that to put it simply are irreplacable. Sorry if this is all a jumble of info, but I'm quite mad/distressed/gobsmacked. Is there ANY way for me to at least recover my work?
TIA
Parag

EDIT: I've managed to get it to recognise and boot from ym array but still I can't get windows to start up. It gets past the loading bars and then it goes blue for less than a second and restarts

[Ceefer]

You've probably already done this but just in case.....

Go into BIOS and re-set everything back to stock. You say you had the cpu running stable at 2.4 ghz but the symptoms you've got sound like overclocking problems to me. Get that cpu back to 2ghz and reboot.

[skattrd]

It sounds like your windows install is corrupt, so getting into windows from those drives in raid0 isn't really going to happen (for your sake I hope I'm wrong here).
Do you have a spare hard disk ? you could try by installing windows on that and then try and recover lost files when you get to windows on the other drive, but I'm not sure if this will work.

Personally I don't have any experience of raid0 so I can't really say what your chances of recovering lost data are, but tbh I don't think they're good.



Quick rant: I wish the current trend for raid0 would stop, yes it increases speed a bit, but it seriously increases your chance of data loss .... definitely not worth it imo. /end rant
Yes I know its easy for me to say that.

[rajagra]

Quick rant: I wish the current trend for raid0 would stop, yes it increases speed a bit, but it seriously increases your chance of data loss .... definitely not worth it imo. /end rant

I hope the current trend for RAID0 increases. It almost doubles the small probability of failure over a given time period, and that just might be enough to convince people to do backups. (Mind you, I can't talk - I have an SDLT320 and I still don't backup often enough!)
But since this problem is not caused by drive failure that's rather academic. The problem recovering is due to (1) SATA and (2) this array controller, both being "non-standard" controllers. A Promise or Highpoint IDE array card wouldn't have these problems because you can even boot to DOS and see the array contents, no drivers necessary (other than the card's BIOS.)
I'm sure the idea to add a single drive with OS then copy files from the array will work fine. Just disconnect the array while you install the OS on the new drive, and when you reconnect it make sure the boot order is correct. Good luck.

[Mblaster]

Can you add a third HDD and install windows on that and boot from it? If your array is still working and it's just that windows files are corrupted so you can't boot, then you should be able to access the other files and back them up from the tempory HDD.

Oh and make sure to reset the BIOS, sometimes when i get 'missing files' errors when booting XP i just set back to defaults and it's fine, i think it;s because the files were corrupted when loading into memory but stayed unchanged on the HDD.

[ReNeGaDe*]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'd already decided not to use RAID0 in my next build (next week). I finally managed to get windows install to recognise my array after countless tries and I finally got a reinstall of windows on it. I have no idea how it got corrupted in the first place, but I found the culprit for my ethernet troubles. Turns out that when I loaded fail-safe defaults it turned off the nvidia lan for some reason. So now I've got my computer back stable as a rock at 2.4GHz and my work intact . The first thing I'm doing now is making a backup of my work lol
Thanks
Parag

[skattrd]

Glad you got it sorted mate, bet you had a couple of changes of underwear though

[rajagra]

I'd already decided not to use RAID0 in my next build

Well, in a way, a single drive *is* RAID 0!!
It is data "striped" over a single drive.
There is no redundancy (and no speed increase.)
Using disks without a higher level of RAID is like playing Russian Roulette.
More unprotected disks=more bullets in the chamber.
RAID 1 or 5 guarantees that the first round is a blank.
It's about time mobos came with RAID5 support as standard. 4 disks in RAID5 is a pretty good setup.

[ReNeGaDe*]

Woah that's news to me. I'm not all that knowledgable on RAID y'see. Ta for the heads up

[schmunk]

It's about time mobos came with RAID5 support as standard. 4 disks in RAID5 is a pretty good setup.

rajagra, do you work for Western Digital / Hitachi / Samsung / etc.

[rajagra]

rajagra, do you work for Western Digital / Hitachi / Samsung / etc.

No, I work for a large bank, and we see several drives fail every day (between 1000's of servers*), but no drama at all thanks to the joys of RAID.
Re my earlier comment, single drives aren't literally classed as RAID0, I was just observing that they can be viewed that way. The difference between a single drive and 2 drives in RAID0 is minor compared to the huge step in safety you get by using RAID1/RAID5.

I have to say the RAID1+0 with hot spare provided by NForce 4 mobos looks great. I feel an upgrade coming on.

*If only I could get our standard server build to run Folding@Home using my name I'd kick ass in the stats.