ok I will give it a try.

The whole point of this is to get the data off the drives. I have some family photos and videos that I'd like back. There is no OS on the raid drives and I don't care about this computer as a whole other than the data. I bought a matching motherboard to give myself the best chance to get the data back.

if this fails, I might just initialize the drive in windows when its plugged in as non raid and then try to connect it as raid again. if that destroyed the partition then oh well. it sounds like we are out of options for this recover attempt.

ok so I have made some progress under your astute tutelage.

Once I got your drivers running on the first drive, I still could not boot with the other drive plugged in. so I did what you suggested and hot plugged in the first one and it appeared in device manager as an originally hidden raid device. it took a few minutes but it came up. Then the nvidia storage control panel popped up a message alerting me to the ability to manage the drive. I went there and it showed me it had one 500 gig drive listed as part of a 1000gig raid array and that the array had errors (probably because it was missing a drive). so I plugged the other drive in but nothing happened. I scanned for hardware changes but nothing. i had to go out for a bit and when i got back i tried again to scan for hardware changes and then it appeared! slowly but it did. it had the nvidia ver10 drivers so i down graded them and rebooted. still would not boot! So I unplugged the second drive, booted and plugged the second drive back in immediately after I passed the raid bios detection screen and when win7 came up, there is was with the correct driver! yay!

But the nvidia storage control panel now shows one drive under the array and one free drive. There is no option to combine them, just create a new array with the one drive or delete the existing array. I then notice that under the custom option for creating an array you could fine tune some options, none of which help me but the last page says that "if no data is being preserved, i must partition and format the array" does that mean that if I AM preserving data, i don't need to partition and format and my existing partitions will be detected? I assume I'd have to delete my original array, make a new one with both drives, don't format or partition and just see what windows does with it?

I won't try until I hear from you.

we are getting so close!

The last time i rebooted it still hung on detecting array with both drives plugged in. I have a feeling if I delete my array and make a new one with both disks, it will probably boot ok, but ya I am worried it will smoke my data. but there isn't anything left i can do is there?

hopefully it will leave the partitioning and formatting up to me but I am fearful it will not.

well I tried to some more reboots and it never lets me boot with both drives. If I plug in the second drive after we pass the raid bios detection screen, it does show up in device manager sometimes, but sometimes I have to rescan for hardware changes first and then it has the ver 10 driver again. when that happens it doesn't show up in the storage control panel.

the Mediashield utility (f10) will not load with both drives but with just the first one the array has an error (missing drive obvs) but the drive itself is healthy. Oddly, when the storage control panel in windows does detect the second drive as a free drive, it claims its healthy. I beg to differ.

So the next time I can detect both drives in the storage control panel, I am pretty much going to just delete the array, make a new one, try to avoid initializing, partitioning or formatting, and reboot and see what happens. maybe at that point a software file recovery tool will work on the drive. I quick formatted a drive a few months ago and was able to get files back in this manner.

I don't think I have any more options unless you know of a software that can let us custom edit raid partition tables on drives and "fix" the array. Perhaps I'll google this idea first.

i am going to try RAID reconstructor http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

Success!

Once i connected the raid drives to a non raid enabled sata ports and booted into windows, Raid Reconstructor was able to easily read the partition information and create a virtual image file which i could then mount with their captain nemo software which is used to read all sorts of foreign file systems. I can now see and recover all my data!

The software cost me a few bucks but it has free upgrades and i wanted a reliable way to recover corrupted data from drives in general. I might start a local service doing this to recover the cost of the software.

Fernando, I want to thank you so much for your time and effort. Without your help I never would have gotten this far. I owe you a debt of gratitude which I will try to repay with the donate button. My credit card is maxed now so I can't afford a lot but I feel you have earned it.

Thanks again

I wasn't holding out hope either. The surprising thing was how easily raid Reconstructor/Captain Nemo recovered the data. Those tools have alot of features to recover badly corrupted data that I didn't need because there wasn't really anything wrong with the data itself. It can probe and guess all the raid parameters automatically. Pretty slick really. There is a pretty good chance had I just started with this, I probably didn't need to buy the new motherboard since I am currently accessing the array via a software controller and not the nforce4 controller.

Either way i am pretty happy and I hope this thread will help somebody else one day. Cheers!