RAID problems
Dell Studio 540 1 Tb computer. House power failed last weekend (blackout). Power supply was fried and being a Dell I have to get one mail order. It was in a surge protector but obviously not a good one. Meanwhile I took one out of an old computer to see if it would work, and managed to get the thing spinning up and briefly giving me the OS (Vista).
But then it stopped, and the message is that it cannot see any HDDs. I was not aware of this before, but I have found it is not a 1Tb drive but two 640G drives in a RAID setup. I cannot find what type of RAID but I have seen it listed on Ebay as RAID 0. How can I find out what type of RAID it is?
One of the HDDs is labeled HDD 0 while the other is labeled as HDD 1.
Can I setup the RAID again, if it has dropped whatever it needs to run two drives? Can I get my programs and data running again? Is it possible to recover any data if the RAID is out of whack? Would it be RAID 0 or, since the machine is only a couple of years old, a RAID 1 or better?
I have a backup of the data but it is a few months old and I have a lot of movies and pictures that I don't want to lose, but cannot afford to pay for a recovery service either. I used EASUS once to recover some data on a normal HDD and that was a great program, would it work with a RAID setup?
How do I go about restoring the RAID, if such is possible, and can I expect the system to run normally if that is done?
I was told that I could boot to the BIOS and tell it to restore the RAID, but does that destroy any data?
Why didn't I know it was a RAID system? Shouldn't it be disclosed?
Thanks, Dell.