Roasted RAID Controller

[delta013]

Hi everyone.

I turned on my computer this evening and starting doing my usual thing. After a few minutes the entire computer froze and I had to press the reset button. Then the computer booted to my IDE hard drive instead of my RAID array, meaning my RAID array was unbootable. XP loaded from the IDE drive and I opened my Nvidia RAID utility, but it didn’t show any array or any drives. I rebooted again and looked for any errors on the Nvidia RAID BIOS, which normally shows the health of the array after POST. Now it simply skipped over it too fast to read. I then opened up the case and discovered that my chipset fan was not moving and was hot.

Specs:
AMD Athlon X2 (socket 939)
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum.
Chipset: Nvidia nForce4 Ultra
Controller: Nvidia nForce4 SATAII in RAID 0+1
Drives: 4 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

I can boot to the IDE hard drive with only a few errors, and the device manager shows the RAID controller, but not the SATA drives or the array. I can't get the chipset fan to run again, so I don't want to run it for long.

I was able to use a video camera to capture the message from the Nvidia RAID BIOS:

NVIDIA RAID IDE ROM BIOS 4.04 Copyright (C) 2004 NVIDIA Corp. Detecting array ... No disk reserved for RAID use, RAID disabled.

My priority is to recover my data from the array. Is there any way I can reassemble the array on another computer/controller without losing the contents?

I have no idea what to do next. My faith in RAID (at least Nvidia RAID) is all but destroyed. I would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

Thanks.

[glc]

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

[delta013]

Thanks glc. I recently discovered that the controller will still work after a long time of cooling. So I bought a new cooler for it to see if I can keep it stable, but it won't be here till Tuesday.