My computer won't boot, I receive ' disk read error' well before windows tries to load. I suspect the MBR is corrupted.

My plan is to use one of the many available boot cd's with tools (hiren's 9.5 specifically)

My question is this: I have two drives in raid 0 (striped) does anyone know if I have to load the raid drivers when booting from cd in order to read the drives?

I have two drives in raid 0 (striped) does anyone know if I have to load the raid drivers when booting from cd in order to read the drives?

It depends on the RAID setup, but most likely yes, unless the boot CD already includes support for your controller. What RAID controller?

I'm going to say 'Almost certainly'

Most boot disks are for recovery of home PCs and thus don't include any RAID drivers. Especially since most of them are based on something like freedos or a very small linux distro.

Thanks for the replies,

Turns out a bad cmos battery is to blame. Computer got unplugged during a lightning storm and the bios settings for raid reset to off. A quick change from disabled to enabled and I was all set.

Time to backup my data and get rid of this stripe. It was cool to do when I built the computer but as the hard drives age the fact that if one goes everything goes seems to outweigh the tiny speed gain.

Thanks again