Hi, my first post here, sorry for the long subject line. It has proven nearly impossible to get the following noob information from the mfgs in question, so I come here seeking enlightenment.

First, is anyone here knowledgeable re: Intel's RAID 1 implementation on the 865 chipset, (in this case on the ASUS P4P800E) and Intel's Application Accelerator RAID utility?
Consider the following scenario:
You have functioning RAID 1 array w/ two WD 160g SATA drives. The array is NTFS, has system & data partitions (C:, D: ) You pull a drive, replace it with a new 250g WD SATA, set the array to degraded & bootable. You begin to rebuild the array 160-->250, using the Application Accelerator RAID Edition under XP Pro. The system bluescreens at approx 20% rebuilt, 160g is now throwing SMART errors on POST, has buku borked sectors, etc.

Here is the question: Considering BIOS parameter translations, etc., would the 250g drive be sequentially a sector-sector clone of the 160g drive up to the point of the crash? (about 20%) Or to put it another way, what exactly is happening at the sector level during a RAID 1 rebuild? I can't find any documentation on this, and no one I could speak to at WD or Intel had any more grasp (or even as much) as I do.
I'm up a creek, it appears that the other "good" 160g has major problems in the lower sectors as well, and there are directories missing from the D: partition, even using partition recovery utilities looking for older copies, etc. This drive flew south as I was attempting to clone it prior to reinstalling it in the ASUS, since it was now the only "good" drive left and I didn't want to take a chance with the RAID BIOS somehow hosing it by mistake during a rebuild. Been there.

I'm hoping that I could somehow create a composite of the 250g (1st 20% of the drive, assuming it has integrity up to the point the rebuild crashed) and this 160g, which should have the sectors intact for the rest of the drive.
I'm wondering if it's feasible to do a sector copy of part of each drive to a new 160g, but I don't know if I need to consider more than the LBA sequence as reported by the disk editors, sector copiers, etc., since all the head data, etc., is translated. I somehow doubt it is as simple as one offset value, etc.

Any of this make a bit of sense? Sorry for the long windedness, but I'm trying to provide as much background as I can.

I'm kinda desperate, as this was my Photoshop/PP system, and I stupidly had not transferred a couple of weeks worth of new images down to my permanent storage, another RAID server w/ ESATA backup. Yeah, stupid, I should/do know better, but I got caught with my pants down big time on this. I've literally burned up 5 very long days on this, and my tires are squarely in the mud.

Any info on the art of sector copy to different geometry would be a Godsend. Also any links to good tools/tutorials for this sort of thing would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

___
Neil

Hi,

OK, you had two 160GB drives mirrored. (RAID 1)
Drive 2 of the mirror failed so you inserted a 250Gb as drive 2.
Then you powered up and INTEL did "rebuild".
I don't think Drive1 160GB has changed.

So now you have 160GB drive 1 and 250GB drive 2 (20%)

Clone 160GB drive 1 to new drive 3 and connect this clone
to good working machine and recover data.

Success !

coffeebean,

Thanks for the reply. I probably wasn't clear in my description, I'll try to word it clearer using your Drive1, Drive2, Drive3 nomenclature, but I have to switch your def of Drive 1 & 2 to match my labeling, or I'll confuse myself worse.

Original config:

ASUS P4P800E, using Intel SATA RAID controller
Drive1= The WD1600JS that was originally removed.
Drive2= The original WD1600JD that subsequently failed during the rebuild.
Drive3= The new WD2500YS

There was no original drive failure. I temporarily unplugged Drive2, let the system boot from Drive1 in degraded mode. I set the XP Disk controller to "Standard ESDI, etc." prior to removing Drive1, installing it on a new Intel GDG33FBC and attempting to migrate the OS installation intact, and just install the new mobo drivers. The OS migration was unsuccessful, 7B errors, no luck doing a "repair install" of XP on the new mobo, etc. I figured I'd start from scratch. I did not want to chance putting Drive1 back on the ASUS mobo for a RAID rebuild since Drive1 was now substantially altered, and the P4P800 is notorious for eating it's young during RAID rebuilds to anything except a factory fresh, untainted new drive. I placed Drive1 in a USB enclosure on another functional system and used the XP Drive Management dialog to delete the partition, so it would be clear which drive was which when I subsequently attempted to use a TrueImage8 CD on the new Intel mobo to clone Drive2 back to this Drive1, in order to try the migration procedure again. Acronis was giving me an estimate of something like a day for the cloning, so I aborted it, dumbly assuming version/sata controller issues. I moved both drives to the ASUS mobo, booted from an TrueImage v11 cd, and attempted the clone again. Drive1 still showed unallocated, so I assumed the prior clone attempt had not actually written anything to Drive1. This time, there was no progress bar all (a version 11 "feature" I later discovered...) so I aborted the clone about 10 minutes or so in.

So for those that are still with me and have contained their laughter so far...

Still believing that I had a "virgin" Drive2, I did what I believed to be the safe thing, put the brand new 250g drive in the Asus with Drive2, booted from the degraded array, and let the Intel raid utility rebuild to the 250. All was well until the bluescreen at 20% plus (the last time I checked it, could have been further into the rebuild.)

At this point, there are no "good" drives.

Hi NeilN,

I think I gave you answer first time.

Success !

No. The very first thing I tried after the rebuild failure was exactly as you suggested, with the drive that was originally removed. Although I was able to restore the two partitions on the drive you refer to as Drive 1, and the C: partition is largely intact, there are many missing directories and files on the D: partition, and GetDataBack, Media Tools Professional, etc. can not find these folders or the files, mostly Nikon .nef (raw) files that were within them. I attribute this to something that went wrong when I had attempted to clone the other 160 back to this drive before I had any idea there was a problem with that drive, before the failed RAID1 rebuild attempt.

If you have any suggestions for the hands-down best data recovery software, I'm anxiously listening

Thanks again, I appreciate your time & help.