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GeertWillemarck

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Boot device not found on RAID1

Hi experts,
A friend of mine brought his quite old Dell PC to my place. The machine doesn't boot anymore. There's the well known error message "Boot device not found". When I look further I notice there are two 1GB drives in Raid-1 and there is also an error message saying RAID 1 failed.
BIOS gives me two options:
- delete raid
- disable raid
The first thing I tried was removing the first disc, hoping the system would start from that disc, but that didn't happen. Only connecting the other disc didn't help me.
I connected both discs (one after the other) on the sata port of my working Windows 8 computer. The discs are found, but not initialized. I suppose initializing them will delete all data.

Can I disable the raid without losing any data? I clicked on the option, but BIOS warned me all data could be lost, so I clicked on cancel.
It is not very important to get the system working again, the only thing that is important is to try to save all data on the disc(s).
Any ideas.
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Tony Giangreco
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SOLUTION
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David
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You can quickly close this posting by clicking Accept Multiple Solutions and selecting the suggestions you mentioned. the posting will close immediately.

Hope this helps.
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GeertWillemarck

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Comment one pointed in the right direction, but was no real solution.
Comment two is a solution, but quite expensive and time consuming.
My solution was for free and very fast.