Do you mean that your OS is busted or that the first array is corrupt?

If the former have you tried at least booting up in safe mode with networking to see if you can copy the data off.

If the latter then I'd stick new disks in to replace the OS ones, create a new partition and re-install the OS.

I've taken an entire set of disks from one machine to another before but i've never tried taking the 2nd array/set of disks to another machine that I can recall.

If you had to create a new array, i.e. the SA didn't pick up on it itself then you may have wiped your data.

Might also be a problem going from Windows 2003 to Windows 2000. Can't remember if the NTFS version changed between them or not.

neill
  

ntinlin, many thanks for help! Machine was starting windows, but stopped with blue screen STOP a few seconds after. I believe something strange was written on the boot array, and it thought it was not raid array any more (the 642 spend a lot time initializing...). Safe mode => same result. Here is my situation now:
I reinstalled fresh win 2003 std from hp cd and I have the machine up and running fine. I have the 2 disks I need to read out of the machine from previous win2003, so should I try to put them in and see what happens? Will I need to define a new logical array (and will this delete the existing data)?
when you said 'the SA...', what exactly is the SA?
best regards!
 

You should hopefully just be able to put the 2nd pair of disks in and have them recognised, however you already defined a 2nd array on the W2K machine using those disks which would probably have overwritten the config.

You MAY be in luck but I doubt it unfortunately.

SA = Smart Array Controller.

well, yes, I just declared again the array with the 2 disks, rebooted, and saw the content within w2k3. Luckily, I did not did the same thing on the w2k machine before, so configuration was ok.
many thanks for your help and best regards!

Cool.

Always good when you get something working again.