RAID mistake = unbootable C drive

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blairman

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Quick background, i have a HP 9300 desktop. when i got the pc last year, i added a 2nd hard drive leftover from the crashed HP i replaced. i am running norton 360 v. 4.0
and have a good backup from last week.
i bought a new 1.5 tb hard drive to replace the slave hard drive, which was significantly smaller.
my blunder: the pc always asks me if i want to set up the slave disk as a RAID disk when i boot up. i was under the impression that this meant Random Access Independant Disk. so i thought that this meant that the 2 disks act as one, without having to select disks when storing items.
so i said yes. the app asked me to select a disk. i selected the new slave disk. the app told me that all data will be lost on the disk. since i had selected the new slave disk, with no data on it, to me, that was no problem...i proceeded. the disks were now RAID disks, and the computer was no longer booting. i went back in and undid the RAID, and of course if you undo the RAID, you also loose all data.
i used an old norton save and restore disk to boot the computer, and try to capture my files, but the C drive is now unrecognizable to window, and the norton save and restore. the disk does show up in bios.
i am assuming that the partitions were deleted on the C drive making it unbootable and unrecognizable.
i need some help on how to restore the partitions, and make this drive bootable again, hopefully without loosing my files.
i ordered and received the factory recovery disks, and i beleive that i can reinstall the factory image, download norton 360 again, reattach the old slave with the good backup file, and i should be good. but somehow, i do not trust that i will get all of my files back. i would like to restore the partitions and make the drive good again without the clean wipe IF POSSIBLE.
any ideas would be very welcome.
blair
 
First thing I would do is use some kind of recovery software to get your important data back. I use a product called GetDataBack. There are some programs that can attempt to recover an existing partition and restore it, you may want to look into that as well.

You could also try something like a Linux Live CD and see if the data is accessible from there.
 
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