raid failing, remove drives?

[joyita]

hi,

i'll try to make this as succinct as possible - i'm pretty sure i've the welcher worm on my pc. it freezes almost immediately after startup after the svchost.exe has encountered a problem message has been clicked away; including in safe mode meaning i'm unable to remove it, run any software, access the registry - nada

i'm running two raided sata drives, i tried to access the utility on startup pressing f4 and it said no device found: utility disabled! although on startup it lists both the drives

so i'm guessing i need a complete reinstall - so my question is, will i risk any of the data by physically removing the harddrives from the motherboard as i have no backup and my plan was to take them into work and backup there?

or better still any solutions to the software side of things? any help would be so so much appreciated, i've spent so long googling and racing my computer to click things before it crashes i'm really at my wits end!

cheers

ah yes - motherboard supermicro X5DAL-TG2, 1 seagate and 1 western digital sata harddrives, 2 gigs memory and running xp pro sp2

 

[The_Other_One]

I seriously doubt a virus would cause your RAID to fail. Sounds more like a motherboard problem, or possibly a drive issue. But as for the question, I removed my two RAID'ed drives a while back and put them back in without a hitch. I'd still backup whatever you can just for safe keeping, but I don't think you'd have a problem.

 

[joyita]

i've read that if you use raid 0, you've got to be super careful with the drives? my problem is since i cant get into the utility, or much else for that matter, i cant find out what type of raid i've used, what do you think, could that be a potential issue?

 

[SirKenin]

Once you take them off that controller, that RAID is done. Lesson number 148 why you never use RAID 0. All your data on both drives is most likely lost.