Need help!

[Crescent13]

We've had this computer for about 3 months, specs are....

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 stock cooling
Gigabyte GA-965G-DS3 mobo (with intergrated graphics)
2GB G-Skill PC-6400 ram
Geforce 7800GT (from another computer)
2 Western Digital 160GB SATA hdd's in raid 0
Antec 380W psu
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate

it's been running perfectly until today, when i installed new nvidia drivers (the latest ones off the website), after installing, i said yes to restart the computer, and that's when problems started.

While booting up, it gave me a black screen, i thought it was weird, and i force restarted it (by holding down the power button), this time, it said "windows did not start correctly last time blah blah", so i go to say "start windows normally" but the keyboard won't respond, and doesn't have any power (it's a saitek keyboard that glows), so i figure it's the usb port, so i switch ports and it still doesn't work.

By now i'm getting worried, and i try again, this time the bios tells me "no opreating system detected". so i go to the bios, load the fail-safe defaults, and remove everything it doesn't need. I pull out 1 stick of ram, the graphic card (it has integrated), the sound card, the internal memory card reader, and every external thing but the monitor, mouse and keyboard.

When i try rebooting again, it doesn't even acknowlege there's a raid array, it just shows two separate hard drives. Now here's the problem, I can probably just throw in a new hdd and get it working again, but how do i re-setup a raid array without reformatting both drives, because i NEED the info that's on those drives...

any help is greatly appreciated

 

[Jiggz]

Since you re-set the bios using default Fail Safe setting, check make sure the SATA RAID is still enabled. This probably the reason the raid is not being recognized. If it's still not recognized, then boot with Windows CD, press F6 when prompted and install the SATA RAID Driver. When prompted to install windows, you can try the Repair Installation. This will not delete your data instead it will just re-install windows.

 

[Enlightenment]

Your data is most likely still on the drives and you can recover this data unless you do something 'stupid'.

First of all, do you remember which stripesize you had used?
Second, please download and burn Ultimate Boot CD (google for it) and run the hard disk utility from Western Digital (in the menu press F2 then go to the second page with the cursor keys). Check both drives but make sure it does not do any write tests. It may of may not find bad sectors please tell me what it does.

Good luck

 

[Crescent13]

Jiggz had the answer . it was the bios setting. But even after i got the mobo to recognize the raid array, it refused to reinstall windows, so i ended up getting an old drive i had sitting around, installing windows on that, then moving everything I needed from the raid array to that drive, then turning the raid 0 array to a raid 1 array and reformatting and reinstalling windows, then moving everything back to the array. but it worked. Many thanks