Raid 0 Gone - Made Big Mistake: Partition Magic

[beekman]

Hi all,

Any help would be wonderful.

I did something stupid. I have the following:

ga-7vrxp, 2 40gig 7200 IBM drives, RAID 0 striped, windows 2000 sp3, worked for a full year, partitioned into C: and D: drives (40 gig each), NTFS

I decided to add a new partition. Just for the heck of it really. I used PM 7, create partition, 600 mb, and FAT32, and placed between C: and D:

Machine reboots, and the batch process starts....it takes a while, but it goes through 5 of 5 steps, moves data, fomats new partition etc.

then reboots.


And now! The array is OFFLINE, the raid bios sees it, but says its offline, and continously beeps. This was working perfectly, before I did this.

I realize squeezing out a FAT32 partition off a NTFS drive is crazy, and let alone, on a RAID 0 setup....so risky, not sure why I did that. now I have a buncch of data a want to save. Is there any way to do it? restore bios? install same array config? should I select rebuild array and will that erase everything?

how easy is it to recover data in RAID 0

scared, beekman

 

[Vegito]

RAID 0 is not raid, the term has be misused. Not sure what options you have. What mobo + controller are you using

 

[beekman]

GA-7vrxp

promise PDC20276 Raid controller

 

[resinboy]

what exactly did you want the new partition for? Did you move any data into it? If not, use PM again, delete the partition, and see if the array is correctly recognized again.

 

[stevewm]

Your mistake here was using Partition Magic version 7

Version 7 is known to have problems with Windows Me and Windows 2000. Version 7 should not be used AT ALL on XP.

 

[beekman]

Originally posted by: resinboy
what exactly did you want the new partition for? Did you move any data into it? If not, use PM again, delete the partition, and see if the array is correctly recognized again.

what I wanted to do was install beos MAX on a small partition...and tinker with it. It wouldn't install on a NTFS so I made a fat32 one.

I can no longer boot at all, since the raid array is offline...so i can't run partition magic again

i am kicking myself, I had important data on C:

 

[bozo1]

Recreate your array and restore from backup.

 

[icexe]

consider it lesson learned. never, never, never, EVER place your critical data on RAID-0 stripe unless you have a good backup in place

 

[WobbleWobble]

You might get lucky by deleting the existing array and recreating the RAID array with the same stripe size. If you can see all your data, great. If not, try a data recovery tool. But it is important that you keep the same stripe size.

 

[beekman]

Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
You might get lucky by deleting the existing array and recreating the RAID array with the same stripe size. If you can see all your data, great. If not, try a data recovery tool. But it is important that you keep the same stripe size.

thanks....thats a great idea...I am going to try that