RAID Disappeared

[3G]

I came in one morning to find my Micron Millenia (with a FastTrak100 IDE Raid controller - 2 40 gig drives, bootable w/striped configuration) "blue-screened". Win 2000 server locks midway through the initialization and suggests I check the drives for a virus. I'd love to, but can't get to them.
I installed a separate drive and loaded Win 2000 on it after Win 2000 Server wouldn't accept the FastTrak driver on the CD. Win 2000 did, and appeared okay, but the drives aren't visible (from My Computer), so I still can't get to them.
Any suggestions are gratefully accepted.

 

[sharder]

At this point, use the Device Manager to verify that the FastTrak driver is loaded, check to see if the hard drives are listed. Use Disk Management to see whether a drive letter is assigned to the stripe set.

 

[3G]

Status now is that WIN 2000 Professional is running on the third drive, which is now drive C:.
Clicking on My Computer takes 10 minutes or so to show, but does show icons for both RAID drives.
The second drive has a description, while the first drive (was the boot drive C in the server) shows "Local disk F:". Attempts to open the second RAID drive from My Computer took forever but worked. Attempts to open the first RAID drive failed, with a message that the drive may be corrupted.

 

[sharder]

If the system is listing the drives separately in Explorer, that means the stripe set is no longer functioning. This is not good news (unless you actually had a Mirror and not a stripe set), in which case you should be able to boot the working drive.

 

[3G]

I'm beginning to wonder if the computer was ever set up properly from Micron. There were always 2 drive letters, and I never really dug into it because everything worked. If a RAID array can have two different partitions, then maybe that was it, but then why am I able to copy off everything from one of them, when the data would actually be spread across both?

When the machine boots up with the controller card, it says RAID 2+0, which doesn't even sound like a "real" RAID configuration...

 

[sharder]

Correct. It is not technically RAID, as nothing is 'redundant'. RAID 0 is nothing more than a stripe set. If one disk goes down, everything is lost. Yes, a stripe set can have more than one partition.

 

[3G]

Obviously I have to do some serious researching here. Let me ask a couple of final things -
1) If the bootable drive was corrupted by a virus or whatever, is it possible that a Norton or other utility could remove/repair the boot sectors and leave the rest of the data accessible? Also, seems like there's an Fdisk option that removes a boot record or something.
2) Do you have any recommendations on a replacement drive system - just in the off chance that this one turns out to be less than stellar....(!)

At any rate, I appreciate the responses.

-G

 

[sharder]

1) Check that you have the current driver for FastTrak100 (current dated March 2002). I've had good success with this controller. It is capable of RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored).
2) Used matched drives whenever possible; use performance matched drives if exact brand-matched drives are not available, at least UDMA 4.
3) Booting into the Recovery Console will give you access to the CHKDSK, FIXBOOT and FIXMBR repair functions. Don't use any Norton tools for these repairs. MCSE-NT4.0, MCP-WIN2K