My hat is off to you nihil. By unplugging and manually selecting the other drive in the raid 1 array that is still good I was able to boot into windows with no problem. I have updated the iastor.sys drivers and program which I hope will stop the issue from happening again. I have made some copies of important files and whatnot just in case this BSOD comes back. The other drive is basically useless and dell will be sending me out a replacement soon.
I can't believe dell told me to format or reinstall windows and start over...what a bunch of crap.
I do get a message now while I type this response that the second hard drive in the raid 1 array is gone and I was wondering what I should do about that. Can I make this drive in a non-raid drive? Or should I just wait for Dell to send me a replacement hard drive and then recreate the array by using that as the new no. 2 drive? Just wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions after this near total loss of data. My raid array shows its status as degraded, which I am sure is because it is missing the other drive in this mirror setup.
I have called up and informed both Dell and Intel about this issue and demanded that they get the word out on this problem hopefully others won't have to go through the same crap I did.
Thanks again.
