Raid Controller Gone Down

A raid controler has gone down on one of my file servers (win 2000 server, I have put the 3 HDD's into another server (not identical) and scanned for the raid settings, on reboot as I expected it blue screened, complaining about hardware differences.

Question:
Is there anyway short of buying a new raid controller for the old server or buying an identical server, that I can recover data from these drives?

I have tryed using a red hat recovery disk to mount the drives but had no luck.

If the array was RAID1 then you can plug one of the drives into any IDE controller (I expect SATA would be the same). However I suspect from the fact you mention three drives that you were running something like RAID5.

Normally in these sorts of circumstances you would need the same controller (or a similar model from the same manufacturer) in order to recover data from the drives. That said, I've been able in the past to recover data from drives using a different controller (original was Adaptec, read using a Promise controller) and it worked fine.

Either way you're going to need to get another controller.

Thanks for that Babylon5

A new RAID controller maybe possible, but be VERY careful as some controllers will notice a degraded RAID and attempt an automatic rebuild, and cause you even more problems... Another factor is making sure you get the default stripe size.

Are the drives SCSI, IDE, or SATA btw?