My poor little Windows machine died. It was fine, then one morning it was dead. Turn it off and back on, power comes on, fans spin, but nothing; no beeps from the BIOS, no video, no keyboard lights. Dead.

I was about ready to get a new computer anyway, but I was hoping to do it in a more gentle fashion. Like get some of the files off the old machine. But I can’t just plug the old drives into another computer. I used RAID 0 striping with the Promise 20276 RAID controller on my A7V333 motherboard. So the data on the drive isn’t in a standard format, it’s in some weirdo proprietary layout.

Short of finding a working motherboard with this RAID controller on it, do I have any hope of getting the data off the drive? Email me if you know! I’d be willing to buy a $30 PCI card just to get the data off, but I don’t really want to set up a whole new motherboard. I wonder if someone’s written a software emulator of the Promise RAID layout?

I’ll never use hardware RAID again for a home computer.