I think my system crashed? Hard-drive is "offline"

[Alex Mc M3]

Ok, you guys helped me build my PC last year quick-relevant specs:

Asus board, Seagate twin 80G drives in RAID 0 (striping mode)

Here is the chain of events:

-Found my screen telling me to load a Boot disc (the black screen) to proceed.
-Put Windows XP disc in, it started trying to install or something like that, so i pulled it out.
-Then i restarted it. At the startup screen it said the a hard drive was not recognized.
-I then went into the BIOS for the hard-drive array and it said that one of the two drives was either "disconneted or failed".. its not disconnected.

What does this mean? How do i fix it? Is my drive ruined?

My buddy told me i might have destroyed my data by putting the XP disc in.

Thanks.
Alex.

[doctorgonzo]

You didn't destroy any data by putting the XP CD in as long as you didn't do any partitioning or formatting, don't worry about that.

Unfortunately, it looks like one of your drives has failed. I woudl download Seagate's SeaTools Desktop and see what that diagnostic software tells you.

[bonebreaker1988]

Did you keep your installation disks for your seagate drives? If you did the seatools are on those disks, put the installtion disk in and fire up your pc and it should run, seagate installtion disk is a bootable disk. Run the seagate diagnostics see what it tells you. If yo have a bad drive you'll find out other wise you have corrupt info on the drive that is dead

[Cricket]

You were running RAID 0? If one of your hard drives has gone south, all your data is probably gone too. That's the biggest risk of running RAID 0...if one drive goes, you're screwed.

Cricket

[diver203_98]

Like Cricket said. When you are unning RAID 0 if one drive dies you loose everything. Because all your data is divided between both drives, there is no back up. So now all you have to do is find the drive that went south and replace it. I run RAID 1, that way if a drive dies, all I have to do is install another drive and "migrate" my data to the new drive. In RAID 1, as you probably already know installs ALL your data to BOTH drives. Also with RAID 1, you will also be able to run your system with that single drive till you can get another.

[Alex Mc M3]

I'm glad there's still a chance..

I just looked through my discs from the build and found nothing for the drives, however, Seagate's website appears to say that there is no driver and that the default whatever takes care of it..

I can't install any tools or anything cause my computer won't even go past the first screen.. windows never loads.

What should i do next??

Thanks

[doctorgonzo]

Download the SeaTools to another computer. You will then create a boot floppy with the diagnostic tools on them. Boot the damaged PC using the boot floppy. You won't need to install anything in Windows.

[Alex Mc M3]

Which SeaTool do i need? there are 3