RAID failure

Without looking up the stats on the filerecovery pro I would say they are talking software raid not hardware raid. You are doing hardware raid. You can't "slave" a hardware raid controller to another driver or system for that matter. "Anyways, we lost a drive, and while trying to rebuild it, we lost the boot sector somehow." This quote concerns me. Did you replace the failed drive? When you say you tried to "rebuild" the array what exactly do you mean? The fact that you lost your boot sector would tell me that you did not "rebuild" but "inited" [initialized] the raid array. If you inited the array ALL information is GONE. No if ands or buts. Normally there is a warning to this effect if you choose initalize. Next question would be was this raid array [raid 5 I assume] partitioned so you had OS and data on the same disk set [raid array]? How many drives in the system? Three? You do have a recent backup/ERD right?

Well, I actually wasn't working here when the array failed. But to my understanding, they attempted to recover the lost data by replacing the bad disk and recovering the array. I believe that during the rebuilding process, the server crashed and after that the boot sector was lost. However, it was not initialized. There was two partitions (it's a 5 disk array), and one of the partitions was the OS, and the other the data. I can get into the RAID BIOS, and it sees four of the disks, and the two partitions, but I can't add the new disk to the RAID in my version of the BIOS, and we think flashing the BIOS will lose everything. There's no backup. I don't know why there's no backup I guess they thought, incorrectly, that the RAID-5 would protect them. They're just throwing me on this to see if i can get it recovered, but if I can't, not to worry about it. Do you think it's gone? Thanks

Try www.computer-recovery.com they may give you some good advice even if data recovery is not essential

Um servers don't crash when you are in a raid controller. They might lockup or a rebuild fails but unless more than just a drive was going bad [like mainboard, ram, overheating...] "crashing" doesn't happen. I would start by getting into the raid controller. You want to use the added drive as a Hot Spare. Once you have configured it as such you should have the option or it will do it automaticly after a reboot, to rebuild the array. Normally you can't add a drive to an array. This is due to the difference of replacing a failed driver compared to adding a drive. Can't add a drive but you can configure a replacement member. This is what a hot spare is - a drive to be used in case of a raid drive failure. This does not explain the loss of the boot sector. But that actually is a easy thing to recover. There is a number of ways but I have found the most reliable is start the NT install from a cd [ME?] boot diskette. It will go thru the setup copying all the setup files. You will need to hit f6 and supply the percII raid driver. Once complete you will automaticly reboot. Start hitting the down arrow. This will stop the automatic boot of the boot.ini dealing with the next step of setup. If the existing boot.ini is there you will have the boot selection of upgrade/install or the old NT boot. Choose the old nt boot. Once up [hopefully] you can edit the boot.ini and remove the install entries and the root install files. Otherwise you can proceed with the NT install and install to winnt2 folder [not winnt if you want to attempt a recovery] but either way you should have access to the data partition. In addition you should not need the added/5th drive to be able to run the raid array and access the data. Things will be slow due to the controller computing the parity bit and missing info but that is the whole reason for raid5. It can run on four drives. Best of luck!