SCSI/RAID Problem ASUS P4PE

[mnd_fl]

What a mess I have made...

Here's my situation.

First the specs.

Asus P4PE Motherboard with an on-board PROMISE Raid Controller. Windows XP SP2
It's used as a Video Server with 2 500G HDs as RAID (Stripe)


I wanted to consolidate all my Raid drives onto one machine, so I took a 6421 VIA Card and 2 120G Drives from another machine and put them on the VIDEO Server machine. After booting up and configuring the new drives, I noticed that the original 1TB RAID drive wasn't showing up and the new RAID 240G drive had the D: designation which WAS the 1TB drive's designation when everything worked fine.

So, using PartMagic 8, I looked and noticed that the 1TB Raid Drive had become a "Type 27" and was "hidden".

After trying many different things for the last 36 hours, here is what I have:

http://rvsmaps.us/temp/scsi-raid2.jpg

I have tried putting the TB RAID drive on different machines to get the data. No luck. I have tried several different Data Recovery Programs (R-type & Partition Table Doctor) but all the files that I tried to recover were scrambled and useless. I have tried the latest VIA and ASUS drivers and I still can't get that driver installed properly. I have tried pulling out the VIA card and uninstalling the driver and the software with no luck.

I should also note that I have tried disabling options thru the BIOS, but I can't find the option to disable the SCSI/RAID Host Controller

The data on the TB drive is VERY important so I don't want to lose it if at all possible..

My next step (and only step before just wiping everything and starting over) is to do a complete whack of the OS HD ( a small 20 G boot drive) and re-install but I really don't want to do that if it won't help.

Anyone have a clue that I can borrow?

Thanx

MnD

[BipolarBill]

You now know why so many people try to discourage the average user from RAID 0. It's just too damned fragile.

What happened initially is that you have too many bootable devices on a limited PC system. The motherboard doesn't have enough addressable memory to support BIOS (IDE), video BIOS, the network adapter BIOS, the Promise *and* a VIA controller. The Promise got dropped and the VIA array took up the drive letter that the Promise had.

This is just FYI. I have no idea how to recover the data short of professional (expensive) help.

[mnd_fl]

Thanx for the info...

The GOOD news is that I was able to get things working.. I never was able to fix that SCSI/RAID driver issue, but I was able to rebuild the RAID array using Partition Table Doctor.

But thanx for the info. I know now not to push the P4PE beyond it's capabilities.

Thanx again.