🚀 go-pugleaf

Sorry for the extensive crosspost.  This has not been my week.  I recently
built a home system with the following components:

- AMD 1.2GHz  Thunderbird (266 FSB)
- EPoX 8KTA3+ Motherboard (with onboard Highpoint HPT370 RAID controller)
- Two 40 GB ATA100, 7200 RPM Harddrives (One Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus60 and one
Western Digital WD400BB Caviar) configured in RAID 0 (The Maxtor was
selected as the boot drive for the only array (0) that I was running.
- Other assorted hardware.
- Windows 98SE

All worked well until a few days ago. While attempting to run a video
application, my system locked up (no mouse movement, no hardrive activity,
no anything).  I was forced to hard reboot the system.

Upon reboot, Scandisk started to run (as expected).  It ran up to around 83%
of its scan and locked up the system.  After waiting for quite awhile, I was
forced to hard reboot again.  Durring POST / BIOS initialization, the Maxtor
drive was reported to have a "Broken Stipe (0)" and the system failed to
recognize the array as a bootable system disk.  Any (and every) subsequent
attempt to reboot would cause Scandisk to lockup as soon as it began).

I rebooted again and entered my BIOS to ensure that none of the drive /
controller settings had changed...they hadn't.  The system still wouldn't
boot.  I decided to boot off of a floppy.  After booting to DOS off of the
floppy, I attempted to view my "C' drive's (Array 0's) content so that I
could possibly retrieve some unarchived data and all I got was
gobble-dee-goo for Volume Name and Serial Reporting and my entire file
structure gone.  About half of the characters in the reporting were okay and
the other half were from the extended ascii character set (even in the words
"Volume in" and "Volume Serial Number" were affected).  The full size of the
array (78GB) was reported as being free.

I rebooted again to enter the Highpoint BIOS to check the status of the
array.  The utility reported both drives as being connected (and even showed
the Maxtor as being the boot drive), however, it did not report the presence
of an array when I pressed F1.

My questions are as follows:

1.  Is there a way of repairing the broken stripe so that the drive will
boot (or at least be accessible enough to retrieve the unarchived data)?

2.  Though the Highpoint configuration utility reports that all exsisting
data would be destroyed, is there a way that I could recreate the array and
still salvage my data?

I would appreciate any assistance this group could offer.

Thanks,
R.A.F.
rafiol@home.com


P.S.  I don't know if it is significant, but both hardrives that were in the
array are their own idividual IDE channel with no "slaves" sharing the
channels.