I had a CPU failure, hoped to repair old OEM XP media center after fitting new mobo and cpu, but couldn't. I had to get a new OS so now have Vista Home. On the old system I had two 250GB hdds in RAID 0. On the new one I didnt want to lose precious data on the old hhds so I have bought two new 500Gb hdds and this time have set them into RAID 1. I have 6 SATA outlets internally and 'SATA on the go' as well as two external SATA ports on my Asustek Crosshair mobo.
Can I connect and copy data from old array to the new one? And how to try please?
Hopefully,
Roy

You may be lucky in that the new mobo has controllers/firmware that can simply "re-assemble" the RAID-0. The same RAID controllers would have the best chance. The information about how the RAID is setup (block size and disk ids and so forth) are normally written into sectors at the very end of the drive. If it can read and correctly interpret this data that would be the nicest result.

However, when you add the two drives to a new RAID-0 it may simply work or it may not. Try to avoid writing anything to the drives - particularly by not accidentally attempting to boot to one of them individually or to the array as a whole.

I suggest that for now you don't RAID the two 500s since you may need the full capacity of one of them to copy or clone the data from a broken RAID if using software such as RAID-RECONSTRUCTOR from www.runtime.org. I think that would be your best hope if the system doesnt automatically simply see the old RAID-0 array normally.

So I would install an OS to one of the 500s, have the second as an empty SATA (both non-RAID). Establish that you have the RAID drivers installed and then add the two old drives as a new RAID-0. If it is correctly accessible as a 500gig volume you know what to do. If not - try runtime.org. The alternative is professional help or messing with a Linux based approach (not easy and may only work from superblock entries). As long as you don't overwrite any of the data area on the two HDDs in question the data should be recoverable completely - though not necessarily simplistically. If you could reattach the two HDDs, unmodified, to identical hardware there should be no problem.

PS I have assumed throughout that the RAID is based in firmware and is not a combination of two dynamic drives configured by Windows.

Thanks Paul for your helpfull reply, annoyingly though I have already set up the new mirror RAID 1 array, so it's fingers crossed whwen I try to read the old raid 0, the link will be usefull if not, I'll report back:)

annoyingly though I have already set up the new mirror RAID 1 array
Don't know what stage you are at but you could remove one of the mirrors from the array and wipe it. The array should then show itself to be broken but should continue to function on one drive. Use the wiped drive for any backup if required and when you are ready just add it back to the array and rebuild the mirror.