Moving RAID-1 set from one NF4 board to another

[jmphx]

I currently have 2x250GB sata drives in RAID-0 set on an Asus A8N-E (nForce4-ultra) motherboard, and I'd like to move them over to a DFI Lanparty SLI Expert (nForce4-SLI) motherboard...

With most RAID controllers I would expect this not to work.. but since both boards have the nf4 chipset, will this work? Has anyone done it?

.. I'm going to try to slim down the amount of data on the drives so I can take an image and back it up to another machine w/ less disk space, then restore the image to the drives if necessary.. I'm just wondering if anyone has done this, and if so, what were the results?

thanks

[jmphx]

Ok, so the answer to this question was no =) .. I moved the RAID-0 striped set from an nForce4-Ultra board to an nForce4-SLI board, and it saw the volume fine from BIOS, and Windows started to boot but would blue screen. Couldn't quite make it into safemode either.

I ended up booting up with Acronis TrueImage workstation on a CD, dumping an image of the striped drives to another box on the network, and then using Acronis Universal Restore option to dump it back onto the box, and windows booted up fine.

Also, a little trick I discovered with Acronis: Since the image of my stripe was pretty big (270GB), and i am an impatient man, I ended up plugging the box directly into another box so I could get GigE speeds during the image creation/restore processes (I only have a 100mbit switch for the home net).

However, Acronis doesn't necessarily like this. It would not accept a UNC/CIFS path with IP address (ie: \\192.168.0.1\share). But, what I discovered, is that you can ctrl-alt-F2 or F3 from the GUI screen over to a shell (Acronis boot cd's are linux). From there, add a hostname to the /etc/hosts file, such as " echo '192.168.0.1 storagebox' >>/etc/hosts " .. Then, from the Acronis TrueImage Management Console, you should now be able to type in \\storagebox\share\backup.tib, and be good to go for your fast restore without DNS or WINS.

[Gambit]

Also, a little trick I discovered with Acronis: Since the image of my stripe was pretty big (270GB), and i am an impatient man, I ended up plugging the box directly into another box so I could get GigE speeds during the image creation/restore processes (I only have a 100mbit switch for the home net).

However, Acronis doesn't necessarily like this. It would not accept a UNC/CIFS path with IP address (ie: \\192.168.0.1\share). But, what I discovered, is that you can ctrl-alt-F2 or F3 from the GUI screen over to a shell (Acronis boot cd's are linux). From there, add a hostname to the /etc/hosts file, such as " echo '192.168.0.1 storagebox' >>/etc/hosts " .. Then, from the Acronis TrueImage Management Console, you should now be able to type in \\storagebox\share\backup.tib, and be good to go for your fast restore without DNS or WINS.

That *is* pretty slick... I'll have to remember that.