I seem to be in a mess here... I had a RAID 5 setup with 3x400GB drives. One time one of the drives failed, so it was running on the remaining two fine, altho a little slowly as expected, listed as "degraded" in the bios RAID screen.... so i sent back the defective drive and meanwhile, continued to use it in its degraded state with no problems except for loss in speed. Then recently the system would not boot to XP, and in the RAID screen, it showed BOTH drives as "FAILED." Knowing no way to fix that, since I needed my PC for work and things, I took those offline (unplugged) and installed a single drive and loaded XP on there and used that. When i tried viewing the other drives through this new XP to see if I can at least see the files, they were both unrecognizable by XP as expected. Then my replacement drive finally came and I put that back in, took my single drive offline, and had all 3 back to what it was... and rebooted with RAID in the bios settings (had IDE while I was on th single). The system still doesnt boot of course, but the problem is there is no option in the RAID bios screen to REBUILD, or i thought it should automatically start rebuilding on its own. I have the screenshot of the info at the end. The problem is now it sees TWO non-raid disks, which is wrong isnt it?? only the new replacement drive should be non-raid and the system should make it raid by rebuilding.. so something is not right here. Any info would be appreciated, or else I will not be averted to simply going the route of recovery and getting rid of RAID altogether, I am sick of this! Thanks. http://www.dathaeus.com/images/raid... OS: XP Pro (Using mobo onboard RAID) HW: Intel E8500, Abit IP35Pro, 8800GT, Corsair Dom 2x2GB, 700W PSU

i could be mistaken, but i think you can only rebuild a raid5 if you lose a single drive. if you lose more than 1, there is not enough information left on the remaining drives (or in your case, drive) to rebuild the array. how are you with algebra? 3 disks is like a 3-variable problem. If you have variables x,y, and z, you will need to know the value of two of them in order to determine the value of the third: you can use x and y to determine z, but if you only have x, there's no way of determining values for y AND z.

I understand it takes 2 drives to REBUILD a RAID config, if that were true, I would have already done it. I am asking can I somehow RECOVER any data from my remaining two disks, where one is perfect and the other has a bad sector it seems from a drive test. I know in a single HD, you can have bad sectors but still recover some data from it. There has to be some way without spending 10k.