RAID degraded

HDDs, Optical Drives and RAID
HDDs, Optical Drives and RAID
degraded RAID 1
Remember that a 2TB drive will give about 1.6TB of usable space after formatting.
This article explains how to setup a RAID 1.
Windows XP recovery console /p c:" 
For everything since, its "chkdsk /f  C:"
The problem can be two fold:
1. the meta data (sits in a hidden area on the drive) has been removed that identifies it as a member of that raid.
2. possibly some data has been erased off the drive.
In the first case, a raid recovery application will be able to recover the data, in the second case, its going to be a lot more work and you will likely have lost a lot of data.
You can look around for some software to do the recovery (like http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/ although I am sure there are others, thats the only one I have played with) or you could send it off to professionals to recover (like Seagate or http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ not used the second one, but have heard some good stories about them) they are not cheap, but if you need your data and don't mind paying, they will get it. 

NVraid takes forever to rebuild, would be much faster to put in the 2 new drives, use something like acronis to duplicate the raid (don't resize it, better to do that in windows sevens drive manager).

To do the rebuild in the BIOS utility you'd probably have to delete the old array and redefine it - watch you don't use the "delete data" which will overwrite the MBR and render your disk empty; to recover from that BTW it's useful to have a floppy with BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) on it to undelete the MBR info. The nVidia BIOS utility is kinda dumb compared with, e.g. Promise' stuff, but if anything is wrong with an array's specs, i.e. it's "broken", you just have to start as if from scratch.
For the Windows software utility, it would surprise me if Gigabyte had deleted it from the nVidia driver pack - it is most definitely in there. At worst, you can DL the same driver set on the Gigabyte CD from nVidia's Archive site, unzip it manually with Winzip and look for the "raidtool" folder, under ...IDE\WinXP\ and copy it to your hard disk. I've seen no way to "install" the software - just run it from the folder; I think it's also necessary to run the .BAT file in the folder first to register the Wizard as a service... at least that worked for me. Then just run NvRaidMan.exe and you'll see how to proceed with a rebuild... which is BLOODY slow: about 12GB/hour and no tuning

forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=173620

Set the drive up without raid turned on, run the seagate Tools tests over it, if it gives you an error number write it down, if it finds bad sectors tell it to repair them (sometimes a lot of times), then if it passes test, its ok, if it still fails, check it for warranty 

Recovering from degraded raid 1
Failed Motherboard with raid1. How move to new Motherboard?
RAID 1 problems
Rather than a 3 drive raid5 (slow under NV raid) why not have a 2 drive stripe (for the speed) and use the 3rd drive externally as a backup? (windows backup works great for this btw)
forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=177090
You probably forgot to break the RAID before you tried to install Win7 onto the single WD hdd.
Do the following:

1. Boot into the RAID Utility (where you set the RAID array).
2. Break the RAID into 2 single non-RAID hdd's.
3. Enter the BIOS and set the SATA Controllers to "IDE Mode".
4. Shut down the PC and remove the old hdd.
5. Boot into the mainboard BIOS and make sure,
   1. that the DVD-ROM is the first and the HDD the secod bootable device and
   2. that the WD HDD is on top of the "HARD DISK BOOT PRIORITY" settings.
6. After having done that, you can boot off the Win7 DVD and install the OS onto your WD HDD.