Okay folks. Let me throw this one at you.

I had my motherboard die on my main machine today.  It was set up with the primary drive as a 2-disk striped ATA RAID 0 array.  The motherboard had an onboard Promise RAID controller.  

Now, I quickly put together another machine, and put an Adaptec ATA RAID controller in it.  It's not recognizing the disks when I connect them as being a RAID array.  Now, I thought RAID 0 was RAID 0.  Moreover, it will not allow me to specify the RAID array in its BIOS configuration, it only allows me to create an array, along with the warning that all data on the disks will be destroy. Is hardware RAID 0 vendor specific?  

I'm planning on taking the Adaptec card back tomorrow and swapping out for a Promise card (at twice the price I might add).  Should that work?  Or is it something I should just forget about and consider the array to be toast?  I have backups of most of the important stuff, but I'd really like to get that array back.  It just seems so silly that because the controller is gone that the data has to be as well.

Most hardware raid is vendor specific, yes.
most of them write the equivelent of a Dacstor area that is sort of the map to the location of data.  ANYTIME you use a raid 0 scheme I hope you are backing up your data as you are essentially doubling the chances of losing data to a disk failure.

Quoted: Most hardware raid is vendor specific, yes. most of them write the equivelent of a Dacstor area that is sort of the map to the location of data.  ANYTIME you use a raid 0 scheme I hope you are backing up your data as you are essentially doubling the chances of losing data to a disk failure.

Like I said, I backed up the important stuff.  I've been meaning to get off of the RAID 0 setup and move to a RAID1.  In any case, this was not a disk failure, rather a controller failure.  I'm just hoping that if it's vendor specific, that Promise is Promise.

Most cards use their own specific method for putting data on the disks. If you attachted them to another controller and setup the raid array you may have already destroyed the previous information on the disks. It looks like you did not so you might be safe.

It would be a good idea to call up Promise and ask them how to recover from this situation.

When you use Raid-0 your reliabilty goes down as any one disk failing will destroy the array.

-Foxxz

Quoted: Quoted: Most hardware raid is vendor specific, yes. most of them write the equivelent of a Dacstor area that is sort of the map to the location of data.  ANYTIME you use a raid 0 scheme I hope you are backing up your data as you are essentially doubling the chances of losing data to a disk failure. Like I said, I backed up the important stuff.  I've been meaning to get off of the RAID 0 setup and move to a RAID1.  In any case, this was not a disk failure, rather a controller failure.  I'm just hoping that if it's vendor specific, that Promise is Promise.

sadly, probably not. Raid is mostly chipset specific. Striping is always a bad idea for the home user, and usually a bad idea for the business user.

Good luck with the recovery effort.