On 27 Nov 2004 18:07:27 -0800, (MC)
wrote:

I had a motherboard with a built in IDE RAID Promise chipset. I used
two drives for RAID 0 (now I know this was a bad idea). To make a
long story short, the system board is shot and I can't get another
with the same RAID chipset.

What does "shot" mean?
Some common failings like failed capacitors or inoperative
bios can be relatively inexpensively fixed, if you don't
have the inclination to do so yourself... especially if you
only need the board operable long enough to copy off data.

Even if I throw the computer out, I really
need to save my data. My questions a

1) If I get another system with a PCI RAID card or IDE RAID chipset on
the motherboard that is not Promise RAID chipset, will my existing
drives work without reformating? (i.e. I can get my data off. I don't
need to boot or anything else).

No, the odds are bad, typically it won't work... but you
might find a promise card with same chipset. Often
motherboards use what they call a "Promise Lite" bios but
it's the same full-featured RAID chip you'd find on a card
(one having same Promise ATA(nnn) chip on it of course.


2) If I just get a new computer (or borrow someones) with normal IDE,
can I plug in my 2 drives as the the 2nd and 3rd drive and use
software RAID (like in Win2000) to get at my data?

No, you definitely can't get that data that way.

What motherboard was it? Is the rest of the system operable
still, for example you have a working CPU and memory
available?