I've had my computer since March of 2008 and four days ago it froze and refused to boot up again, always getting to the Windows XP loading screen, progress bar moving, and staying there for, say, a half hour before finally giving up and going completely black. In the pre-boot hard drive screen, I saw that my C: drive, a Seagate 500 GB, had suffered a SMART Event. My E: drive, two Seagate 1000 GBs striped in RAID 0, was apparently fine.

Earlier today I bought a Western Digital 500 GB to replace the SMARTed Seagate. Unfortunately, my computer uses SATA and has no floppy drives, so the Windows XP boot disc wasn't able to read the WD drive and I couldn't use my RAID/AHCI Driver floppy to enable it to do so. Following advice I found online, I switched the Drive Configuration in the BIOS from RAID to IDE, which allowed me to install XP onto the Western Digital. The aforementioned advice assured me that I would be able to switch back to RAID without problem.

Unfortunately, I can't. Trying to boot the computer in anything but IDE causes an inescapable restart loop when the computer attempts to boot and of course, booting in IDE prevents my E: drive from being read correctly by the computer when it is on.

I very much appreciate any help anyone can provide. I truly do need to get my E: drive running again as it contains all of my irreplaceable documents and such (I do realize it's dangerous to have irreplaceable documents on a RAID 0 volume).

Thanks for reading, desperate for advice,

Jason

I am running:

Windows XP Home SP2
Intel 2 Duo CPU E4500 2.20GHz
4 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Optiarc DVD RW
Western Digital 500 GB
Formerly: Seagate 500 GB (now dead), Two 1000 GB Seagates: RAID 0.

Hello and welcome

The first thing I would have done, is to reset the CMOS by removing the battery.
You, on the other hand, evaluate your PC experience as beginner, and that raises an issue:

If you reset your system's BIOS to the default settings, ALL changes will be reset.

That includes the RAID configuration as well. If you remember what settings you had (block size), most likely all will be well.

However, I do not know that information (or your motherboard's Model and Maker for that matter), and I cannot encourage you to proceed with the reset.

On the other hand, why can't you use a USB stick to install the drivers from? Or maybe a Bootable USB stick.

Or, if that sounds complicated, go out and buy a USB floppy drive (yes, there are still around). It costs about 20€ in the Netherlands, and you can always have it handy in case you need it (like now for example)

Sorry, my motherboard is an Intel DP35DP. I would presume that resetting all of my BIOS settings to default would still result in my computer being unable to boot, wouldn't it?

I considered buying a USB floppy drive but I wonder if that would actually fix my problem now. It would allow me to use my RAID/AHCI Driver disk, which I could use to reinstall XP once again to my Western Digital, this time with my Disk Configuration remaining at RAID, but I'm wondering if there's any way to get my Disk Configuration back to RAID without needing to reinstall.

I do have an Ultimate Boot CD, but I don't know if that would help me.

Thank you so, so much for your help and attention though. I really do appreciate it, and I apologize for my ignorance.

Hi

Sorry for the delay BTW...

You may wish to try:

Re-flashing the BIOS or
make sure ALL HDDs are firmly connected or
unplug one disk and try booting

You will need to re install xp and give it the sata and raid drivers and then you can use the raid again. It wont see it without the drivers. Raid 0 writes data 50% to each disk so if one disk fails the other is useless as it only has half the files. So for raid 0 never keep any valuable data

Normally in the bios or in software once you install it there will be a raid control program which lets you configure your raid.