I think my laptop has a hosed raid 0 array. I did a quick look online at several repair/recovery tools. Anyone have suggestions for tools?

Is it bootable? Like its losing files, or it booted up and the raid controller bios said something like Logical Drive Failure?

When booted it says:


BOOTMGR is missing
press ctrl + alt + delete to reboot

I went through the recovery CDs and tools it came with and even used the phone support at Alienware. It had been acting up, I thought it had some corrupted DLLs and was just starting to look into it when it died. When it died I thought one of the 2 drives had died, but the guy at Alienware thinks the drive is still there and fine, just the raid is corrupted.

recovery cd's should not be getting this error.

I don't think any utility is going to save/recover the drive to be honest.

I would go into the raid/bios or utilitiy what ever it has and delete the array and recreate it, then run the recovery cds. But honestly thats what the support guy should have had you do as well.

At this point you could certainly try a utility, I don't think it can do any harm, but it sounds like the array is hosed.

An array can hose cause of bad drivers, improper treatment (powerdowns), or a failing drive. Not necessarily a failed drive, but one that is just failing.

If the raid controller has a verify command when you recreate the array, do it. It is slow, but it basically confirms identical read and writes at each sector location.

Surprised dell support didn't get you further along here.

If I delete the array and rebuild doesn't that blank out all the data?

The TS guy I talked to tried to get the bootmgr rebuilt, but with no raid array in place it can't see the OS or any boot stuff to fix.

However this resolves, I think I'm done with raid0. It didn't seem to help performance much and has this greater risk. Once recovered I'll set it up on a single hard drive and just use the second for storage.

BINGO!

I have raid 0 on 3 boxes, none are laptops. no problems as of yet. One box is at least 5 years old, old 10k Raptors, 75 gig. I do however see a problem with a raid 0 on a laptop. For me, I would consider "Raid anything" on a laptop an accident looking for a place to happen, especially when moving/jarring/dropping the laptop is concerned. The controller gets out of sync w/the hd, and no matter what you do, you have lost the array.

I did do RAID 0 for a while when HDD were at 5400rpm. (or whatever the 5k speed is). I stopped RAID 0 after i bent one of the rods on the IDE port >.<

Now I just use RAID 1 for my important stuff like music, video etc.

Sadly if you go RAID 0 you're taking 2x the risk of losing all the data on the drives for the extra speed.