Two HDDs in System. Deleted partition on Drive 0 now cant access Drive 1?

[martyrunnells]

Ok. I tried everything to repair an XP install on my Qosmio GA35-650. The recovery disk was a joke and wouldn't work...I decided to skip all of the DMI junk I read about and clean install a copy of XP.

Put the Raid drivers on a floppy and proceeded with the install. Setup would not install on the boot partition and gave me a "page_fault" error. I went into the bios and changed disk 0 to JBOD from RAID, disk 1 was already set to JBOD. Reentered setup and at the point where you select the partition to install to only one partition was shown. This was not a good thing as I backed up all of my data from the C: drive (Disk 0) to the F: Drive (Disk 1). I went back to the BIOS and set Drive 0 back to Raid and started the Setup procedure over again. Two partitions were showing this time but Disk 1 was not showing an F: drive designator.

The question. Did I lose all of my data on the second 100gb drive in the system? Is my F: drive recoverable?

Help!

 

[kimsland]

I think it depends on what Raid type you were using, some good info of different types here: https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?p=597010
Personally I don't like Raid all that much, as I don't think it's fantastic for data recovery or backup (which was its actual purpose, plus speed)

 

[martyrunnells]

Solution found. Since Disk 1 is a physical hard drive I did not lose any data.

When XP finished installing I located the second drive using Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Storage.

The drive appeared as Foreign, Dynamic, 0 MB Capacity 0 MB Free. ( That really had me worried!). When I right clicked the mouse on the drive two options appeared:

Import foreign disks

Convert to basic disks.


I crossed my fingers and imported the foreign disk. Windows recognized it, assigned it a drive letter and my data was made available.

DO NOT CONVERT TO BASIC DISK.

Thanks for pointing me to the Techspot thread kimsland. I learned a lot about RAID in the process of getting my QOSMIO up and running.

 

[kimsland]

Thanks for the update :grinthumb
Also the "Import foreign disks" from right clicked options is excellent information, which I may quote your post again, to others