First of all, may I thank everyone for responding and please keep the
ideas coming. I've tried a few of the suggestions without success and
here are my comments:

Andrew,
"1) - get a second replacement drive for the one that died and connect
it up. THe controller should copy the good drive onto the new drive
and all should be well. If the wrong one is imaged (ie the newer
drive) onto the old drive, the information will be lost for good"

I thought of this but I am not to keen to invest in more SATA drives
when the chance of success is low. Consider, if the mirror drive is
still fully intact and can be imaged to a new drive then why can't I
boot from the drive now stand alone.

"2) - disconnect both SATA drives from the controller and start the
computer. When you get to the configuring of the sata controller,
disable the raid array / delete it. Do this with the drive
disconnected incase there is some information it tries to write to the
hdd (or tries to format them, I am only guessing what it will do).

Then turn off the computer, attach the working drive and boot again.
do not acess the controller (as it should not be needed). If it asks
to do anything to the drive, click no or turn the power off (so
nothing is done to the drive).

if it works, you should get into windows and see the drive. If not,
you will have to try option 1"

Worth trying, assumes RAID info is written into the BIOS and not just
onto the drive. However, when I tried it the result was that the RAID
utility could not be accessed, i.e. with no drives attached.


the best plan would be to plug the drive into someone else's sata
controller and get the data.

This comes back to the question of whether a single SATA drive can be
configured on the A7N8X because if it can then I should be able to
plug the drive in and view it as well as I could on any other machine.


Paul,

I downloaded the Syba driver but could not get it to work with my
onboard SATA raid controller, i.e. shown as not enabled in the device
drivers dialogue screen

"Another way to attack the problem, would be to buy a separate
SATA controller card that can operate in non-RAID mode and put
the remaining good drive on it. That is, if the syba driver
above doesn't work for you."

Might work but again why doesn't the SATA controller on-board work
with a stand alone drive?


To round this off with yet more questions. The solution to this would
seem to be to understand more of how RAID works. It is not well known.
I want to know if the RAID instructions are located in the
hardware/BIOS or whether information is written to the disk itself. If
on the disk then it is possible my problem is caused by these
instructions being corrupted. If you think about it, some RAID
information must be written to disk because if the instructions were
on the MB and CMOS was reset there would be no flag to tell the
controller if the disks were a RAID 0 or 1, stripe size, etc.

So the controller cannot find the information it needs and somehow
consequently Windows is not able to see the disks. So what I want to
know is how to delete or re-write the RAID instructions to the disk
without deleting all my data. I also want to know for sure how a
single SATA HD is configured on the A7N8X.

BTW, I am very grateful for every ones advice on maintaining a
back-up. You would think after many years of tinkering with PCs I
would know this by now. Actually, I had all my normal data backed up
on another networked PC but was running out of space for the family
pics, the space taken by which was expanding at a great rate. I knew I
should write them to a CD but kept putting it off. I was thinking to
myself, no worries, it can wait a few weeks or months. I have RAID1!

Cheers and thanks again.