Hi Guys

I am trying to fix a problem a friend has experienced but it is proving a bit beyond me!

Basically, his set up includes an SSD boot disk plus 2x HD103SJs in RAID0 for data. All well and good if you back up regularly but, unfortunately, he did not and the inevitable happened - one of the drives died. I have isolated the faulty one and found that it did not power up at all which made me think it must be a faulty PCB. As luck would have it, he bought 3 HD103SJs at the same time (the third was supposed to be his external back up!) and the spare is pretty close serial number wise to the faulty one. I have swapped over the PCBs and, on installing it into a caddy, it seems to power on etc. I have now installed it back into the PC and want to see if I can get the RAID0 array back up. This is where my abilities come to an end. Both HDDs are detected in BIOS. I believe that RAID is still enabled insofar as boot takes far longer than normal presumably as it tries to find the array. Going into Disk Management I see the following:



ie the array shows up as just one HDD and appears to be uninitialised. What I am not sure is whether this means that the PCB has not worked or if I just need to do something to re-set up the array. I have tried using RAID Reconstructor but that can only see the one double size HDD so that is no good.

Any thoughts truly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Hmmm...

If this is a RAID 0, then you are indeed supposed to see "double size", ie. 2x1000GB = 2000GB of total size. So this seems correct to me.

As far as the problem you're describing, I would try and recover the data of the raid array independantly (ie. set up the RAID from scratch and recover the data onto a new drive). But first you need to ensure that both drives detect normally.
DO NOT INITIALIZE THE ARRAY on disk management.

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Hi,

First check if both drives are really working fine, by connecting them separately to a computer and check if you can "see" the drive for example in device manager.
If you confirm that both drives are fine, it may mean that something happened at least to MBR, as the volume is detected, but no MBR or partitions found.

To be sure that you can access the drives, use a hex viewer to view the contents of each drive and sweep it a bit, so you can confirm you have access to it.

I think the sata cables are switched.
the raid bios reports the complete volume size correctly to windows disk manager, but windows doesn't see a boot sector or partition. this is the result

Thanks for the comments. I've managed to fix the problem - but by accident! I decided to double check the RAID set up in BIOS and see that both volumes were functioning correctly. So I entered the BIOS, changed the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, re-booted and pressed CTRL "I" lots. All seemed well. Both drives appeared - including the faulty one with the replacement PCB - as part of a RAID0 array. So I re-booted. I forgot to reset the SATA mode from RAID back to AHCI so I had a couple of BSODs and much scratching of head. So I went back into the BIOS, changed it back to AHCI and re-booted. Hey presto, the array is accessible and I am now backing up all his files!