To my knowledge, outside of using expensive software or knowing someone with extensive knowledge of hard drives and raid configurations, its damn near impossible to recover files from a borked Raid 0 Array.
Recently, my main 24/7 Rig with everything loved by me on it, lost its Raid 0 Array. This system has been stable for a quite a long time without issues.
At the time of Death, I was listening to web-based Pandora.com music. First error was Pandora attempting to write to memory that it did not have permission to do so. I closed IE8 and restarted everything and continued listening to music. Then, splat, reboot.
Areca Raid Controller Post Screen related that the Raid 0 Array was in "out of normal" state. Further investigation showed one of the raptor drives was on the fritz (gone).
I haggled with the system to try and coax the raptor back from the afterlife and attained a partial boot into Vista64. THe OS decided to do a checkdisk and attempt to repair, this failed. Tried this a few more times over a few days (Takes forever) and all of them failed.
I tried installing another iteration of Vista onto the borked array, this failed. Tried installing Win7, this failed. My intention was to get a working os and transfer all my precious files over and back it up. (I never backed this pc up because I had the false pre-tense that it was solid as a rock, AND I procrostinate
)
SOLUTION:
During the repair screen, using the Vista Install disk, select load drivers. This brings up whatever the bios sees on the mobo. (Which is ridiculous that an install disk can see all the drives and files on them, including the raid array, but can't install to them WTF! )
Now select your user profile, in my case its a folder with my name (this includes desktop items, pics, music, downloads, bla bla bla bla). Right click, copy. Now navigate over to a usb external drive (Hook this up prior to boot). Select a location and paste. Boom, it'll start transfering all the files that are NOT corrupt.
COMMENTS: There were a bunch of files lost but I'd say 90% of my precious files were recovered.
Now to skip Raid 0 action for a while and run Raid 5 or make sure I damn well back up the entire array. Other options is to create a pass thru drive on the areca card and slap a 1terabyte drive on it and use that for continuous backups or precious data files. Mussint forget upgrading Areca 1220 firmware
Hope this helps someone else with a bruised and battered Raid Array.
Specs:
6 150gb Raptor Raid 0 Array
790i Ultra SLI Mobo
OS Vista Ultimate