RAID1 only protects you from harddisk failure. If one harddisk dies all the data is still on the second one. I once had a customer who´d thought that RAID1 is a 100% protection, then his PSU died and killed his entire computer. Harddisks, CPU, Board, everything. He also had never made a backup...
A Windows breakdown will be mirrored. But of course the data can be recovered, simply attach your harddisk to some friends PC as the second harddisk and copy all important data. That would have also worked for Syxx.
Also never use only one partition, create at least two. Don´t store important data on the Windows partition.