I have a 1TB USB drive which crashed and became completely inaccessible so I cracked it open and found 2 WD5000AAKS SATA drives paired up in a RAID 0 configuration. I took the first drive out and slapped it on one of my SATA channels and all went well, I was able to recover most of the data. I took the second drive out and slapped it in on the same SATA channel and boom! First, my bootup went veeeery slowly, then windows XP eventually started loading and blam! A quick blue screen flash and auto re-boot. Next I swaped the PCB with the 'working' drive and it still crashes XP on startup.

Prior to booting in XP I checked both drives in the BIOS and they both showed oddly as 2 drives with 0 MB, I assume this is because they were set up as a RAID 0 and I split them. How can a non-boot SATA hard drive cause so many problems with the BIOS and the OS? Any ideas on how to get the data off my remaining drive would be much appreciated!

Ok, I've found some posts here with similar problems and it's looking more and more like this won't be a simple non-surgical recovery effort. The drive data is not $1500 critical so maybe I'll experiment with opening it just for fun and if I'm very very lucky I'll get my data back and if I'm not lucky it'll be as much of a brick whether I had opened it or not.

Hello and welcome to the forum. You dont say many details, but have you checked if you have the latest bios on your MB? With these new drives, the bios may not see them properly making you think there are more problems than there really are.

Well, if you don't open the drive, you may have a chance of recovering something. If you open it, you have no chance.

Thanks for the welcome and sorry for the shotty details. I posted this from work where I don't have all the details available. I just found this very curious because in my 20 years of working with computers I've never had a slave drive cause my computer to crash, not readable yes, but they've never crashed my system before.

My MB is only 3 weeks old so it should be fine and I have a 1TB drive it is reading fine but regardless I think your idea is good and I will try and update my MB BIOS and see if that helps. I will also try installing the drive on an older machine to see if that works. Anything beats opening the drive, at which point this becomes more of a learning exercise than a recovery.

Oh yea, there are so many things to check before you get to a point where you even think about opening it. Unless it sounds like its doing the click of death thing. Then you still check things, but thats a pretty hopeless sound if you were to ever hear it.

I haven't heard the click of death yet so I have quite a bit of flailing left to do before it gets to the surgery point. Thanks for the helpful tip.

This does not seam like a big issue
since it's a Raid 0 your data is striped over both drives. Purchase recovery software which can recover RAID sets, and then image both drives. The second drive is most likely crashing because of corrupt MBR. Disable MBR and it should work fine. you can do this with MHDD.

P.S. If you have problems with this I can give you a good deal for the recovery!

Have fun

before I forget:
It's not MB issue and BIOS update will not help. Don't waist your time with that!

Its never a waist of time to ignore your MB bios. Only a fool will ignore some basic checks. The guy said he got nonsence when he hooked it to his MB. That could very well be a bios issue and its easy to verify it. Thats not to say it will fix the raid issues, but it may verify the drive is healthy. So go tell somebody else their advice is a waste of time mr quasimodo. That is very rude of you...

If you recovered a lot of data from one drive, then it ain't RAID 0!

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