RAID 0 recovery - Help Needed!

[DoomSword]

Hi guys, nice to find you

I stumbled on this site looking for info on how to recover my raid 0 arrays which I may have messed up...

so here's the deal

I had/have two different sets of hdds in two Raid 0 arrays, they were 2 x 125gb and 2 x 250gb

my mobo failed last week, so I had to buy a new totally different one (changing the cpu and ram in the process as my old stuff were obsolete by now)

so i hooked up the drives on the sata ports, in the same order they were before, the 2x125 in sata 1,2 and the 2x250 in sata 3,4 also each disk in every pair was hooked in the order it was on the old mobo

anyway, as I was ignorant about the fact that i can't just recreate the arrays and keep my data unharmed, I went ahead and set the SATA configuration in BIOS to RAID then rebooted, entered the AMD RAID Option ROM utility for RAID configuration, and set two arrays (one for each set) using 64kb as stripe size (for both, then i remembered that the 2x250gb array was originally at 128kb in my previous setup.... I know, I'm an idiot.... but the 2x125gb set was 64kb), then set the size as 'full capacity' of the drives.

the new raid arrays were noted as functional but of course it didn't boot the old widows installation they contained. I figured it would be that Windows needed the RAID driver of the new mobo.. so I booted with a Windows XP installation cd, added the driver and proceeded for widnows repair or re-installation. However when I got to the drive selection for the installation, I saw the two arrays noted as UNPARTITIONED... cold sweat run down my forehead

I tried changing the RAID setting at the BIOS to AHCI (no clue what this is), Windows installation then saw my old partitions but described them as empty... (note that in this way the 4 disks were showing seperate, no raid array, but for some strange reasons the partitions showed up...)

anyway, I set it back to RAID, and run a DOS version of Active@ partition recovery from a bootable cd. It sees the two arrays as unpartitioned so I scan for partitions in the first array (it takes ages...) and nothing comes up...

then I google for RAID recover and stumble upon an article, which says that setting new arrays is a cardinal sin...

my question is (and I'll be eternally grateful if you help me) can my data be recovered? can I still fix this or it's all over?

I'm thinking of buying a new disk standalone, to do a fresh windows installation and see if I can recover anything via windows software...

so you guys think you can help at all?? any good software suggestion?

if you need any further details let me know

many thanks in advance

[DoomSword]

alright, so I bought a new hdd, installed windows on it, left the 2x250gb raid on the system, booted with SATA/AHCI

Windows saw the partition of 500gb but as faulty... I installed RAID Reconstructor v.402, and it worked like a charm!

it found my partition intact and all the data in perfect condition! once I finish saving what I need, I'll try the other array

so take notice whoever finds him/herself in a similar situation!