8890 Little Problem just got a lot Bigger

I have an 8890 laptop. My hinges on the laptop, where you open and close the lcd screen cracked on the

edge. This has happened before, I just order some brackets and fixed it last time. So it happened again

after 2 years. I know the hinges are really tight so I open the laptop more than normal to get to the hinges

and loosen them so this would not happen again. Now the hinges are done. I am waiting for brackets to

come in the mail. But, this is where the problem gets bigger. I start putting the laptop back together so I

could check my e-mail on outlook. I power it up and no video wow. This is not looking good. I powered it up

and down a few more times. I saw that I could see the text on the lcd screen but super dimmed down to

almost nothing. I looked up this problem. Most people said that I would need to get an LCD/Inverter

replaced. So that like $99 there I still wanted to check my e-mail so I hooked it up to CRT monitor. Another

problem my raid 0 of two 60gig 7200rmp says status off line. So I look and see that only one drive is coming

up. I thought maybe I did not push the hard in all the way when I was re-building it. I check it and then

boot up again and nothing only one of the 60gigs is coming up. So I took off the hard drive that was coming

up on the post. Then I connected the one not coming up on the post in its place. But still did not come up. I

don’t know if my hard is really dead. To me it looks like it is any way of getting back my data on a raid 0? If I

get another hard drive?

Any thoughts?

Wow, that little problem is definitely getting bigger. The LCD dimness problem does sound like either the inverter or the lamp in the backlight.

Concerning the hard drive issue, I can tell you that if you have a RAID 0, a striped array, then you won't be able to recover your data if one drive is actually dead or corrupted because data is written across both drives for faster access. It's not a good sign that swapping the working drive with the non-working one didn't even make the other drive detect. Did you change anything at all about the drive when you removed it? Do the drives show up in the BIOS? I'm not sure what could make the drive fail just by taking it out and setting it aside, that doesn't make much sense. If you have an external hard drive enclosure you could try attaching it to a second computer and see if the drive is at least detected. Since it's part of an array you can't really do much with it, other than see that it is working.

I got it all working again thanks