Problems with the hard disks

Lately I've been having problems with my hard-drives. I had 2 SATA drives on a stripped RAID array and one of them broke. Here's what I did in not exactly the same order to recover my data. I'm no expert but maybe this can help somebody.

1. Check the drives with the Windows install disk (it couldn't have seen the partitions right)

2. Check the drives with a Linux install disk (Ubuntu, Knoppix or could have used Fedora's). No big difference using "fdisk -l" to see the partitions correctly.

3. Download "Ultimate Boot CD" [http://www.ultimatebootcd.com] and burn it on a CD. You can get a basic version and a full version that also has a Linux based OS and some more programs that you can use to check disks/partitions and some other good stuff (like antiviri).
UBCD has some built-in firmware programs for physically checking your hard-disk. Use these to repair partition/fix bad sectors if possible.
If all fails try moving your hdd to a Windows system /adding a good hdd to your system and installing Windows. Next:

4. Use Partition Magic to check your hdd. If you don't care about the data on the disk fully-format your drive:
- right click on the drive to enable bad sector checking
- recreate/create partitions to fill the disk and format them
There's a bug with bad partition info in Partition Magic 8 that makes the program fail to start so use Paragon Hard Disk Manager to repartition a disk.
You can also use the Windows chkdsk or Norton System Works - Disk Doctor to check/fix the drive.

5. If the data on the disk matters to you use Get Data Back [http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm]. If you have a broken stripped RAID try RAID Reconstructor [http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm] first to un-strip the disk first.

6. If finally you find that you have a completely unusable disk drop it and buy another. Else, try using a disk monitor like HDD Health [http://www.panterasoft.com] to notice any problems before they become too serious. This is especially nice with the SMART option enabled on the drive.

Finally I wasn't successful because the damage to one of my drives was too great.