Dead hard drive?

[Markel]

Last night one of my IBM 75GXP Raid 0 (ABIT KT7A-RAID mb) drives decided it didn't want to work. What is interesting is that it seems to spin up ok (the Highpoint Raid recognizes it), I get the Boot Magic prompt, which brings up the Windows 98 startup menu (I like to have the options available for a few seconds), but once it starts the next step after the menu, I get what sounds like a ratchet sound (when you are using a socket wrench) that repeats about 3 times in one of the drives, and things go no further.

I recovered my C partition from a ghost backup onto a spare drive, so I can get back up and running. I wondered if maybe I might be able to recover some more recent data from some of the partitions on the failed drive. I enabled the Highpoint drivers in my BIOS (but removed the raid from the boot device list). But when I do this, the behavior is the same as when I tried to boot off the Raid drives, even though the system is now booting off my spare drive.

Anybody have any thoughts?

[DREDD]

I don't think it's possible but try running the drives as single drives. See what you get.

[Markel]

Well, I tried a few more things. I downloaded the IBM drive utility and let it check the drive. It found some bad sectors but said it couldn't repair them (big help!).

Yesterday I had one more thought: enable the Highpoint controller, the boot (off a recovered C drive) into safe mode. Bingo! It allows me to see the partitions on the "bad" raid 0 drive. I've started copying off things I don't want to lose. Then I'll start addressing how to get a working Raid system again. I'm not sure I want to pick up another 45Gb IBM 75GXP (or even trust an IBM replacement or possible reformatting of what I have), which means I'll probably be looking for two new reasonably sized hard drives -- I see that Outpost has the 60GB WD for $130 ($30 instant rebate) -- not too shabby as long as I order from two different accounts.