A*N-SLI Premium Sil3114 Controller Died. How to recover?

[toy4x4]

Well, the SIL3114 controller on my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium just died. I had four hard drives connected. 2 WD 10K RMP 36gb Raptors in a raid 0 config for boot and 2 Seagate 300gb in a raid 0 config.

I took the two 36gb raptors off and put them on the NVidia controller in order to get XP up and running again, but the two Seagates are just sitting there unplugged. I need to figure out how to get the data if at all possible off these two drives. I have all my documents/pictures/mp3s, etc.. Let's not go down the backup path right now...

So what can I do? I have a friend with the same motherboard and I could possibly use his. He only uses the NVidia SATA so I could hook the two drives up to his sil3114 controller. Will I be able to recreate the raid 0 and retreive my stuff?

Help!!

[Snugglebear]

In a perfect world the answer is yes, you can just hook up the seagates to the other sil and the array will be detected and utilized by that machine. This relies on the fact that the array configuration is written to the drives themselves as well as to the controller's EEPROM. Manufacturers do this to assist in times of failure, when perhaps a bios flash damages the settings in the EEPROM, or one of the drives goes stupid. However, the reality is that the el cheapo controller implementations are not all that great, and often times there can be problems in getting this to work right. Understand that you should probably try it, but be aware that his board may need a bios flash or some other type(s) of futzing before it works correctly. Be prepared to be very frustrated if this doesn't work on the first shot.