PLEASE HELP !!! if you can...

[Wolverdick]

So here is my problem...

my motherboard died unexpectedly last week. It was an ASUS M2N-SLI deluxe. this model is discontinued so I installed a new ASUS M3N-HT deluxe. The installation went fine but of course I now have an entirely new chipset and raid drivers. Thus I could not access my hard drives (500Gb raid striped) which had my XP64 installation on them.

I thought it would be a good time to make some upgrades so I installed a new pair of 10000rpm drives striped to form a new 300Gb startup drive, on this I have installed the new Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

All of this has proceeded smoothly except that I still cannot access the information on my old drives. Windows 7 can see the drives, but cannot read any of the information from them.

I thought I would try an upgrade installation of windows 7 on my old drive, but I still run into the roadblock of there not being the proper raid drivers on that disk. Windows can only upgrade after logging in to the excisting OS. Ive tried everything I can think of to get the raid drivers onto the old disk but to no avail.

While there is a lot of stuff on the old drives, I really just need to access my old documents folder so I can pull off the most recent copies of some improtant work Ive done, then i would be happy to wipe those drives and start over.

so my question is... HOW CAN I GET TO THE INFORMATION ON MY OLD DRIVES???

any and all help is greatly appreciated...I am at the end of my wits on this.

[glc]

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

Now you see why we discourage RAID 0 around here unless you do backups religiously. It's not just the drivers - its the raid bios. The controller must be identical, and the parameters must also be identical.

Look at this as a $99 lesson.

I would also recommend that once you get your data recovered, you take one of your old drives and install it as your DATA drive, then take the other one, put it in a housing, and use it for backups.

[Wolverdick]

glc, you are a lifesaver! Thank you very much for your help.

I have thouroughly learned my $179 mistake... had to buy the file recovery program too...

But with those programs I was able to successfully access my old drive and copied the files I needed to my new drive. (and to a backup drive as well.)

I know I probably should not continue down this RAID path, and I may go ahead and unstripe the two larger drives and use those for storage, but I will probably keep the striped startup drive for now.

I think I might also buy another motherboard and put it in storage, that way three years from now when/if it dies I wont have to face these issues again.

[glc]

Just keep a backup of your stripe set on your backup drive.