possible to setup RAID-0 without format?

V

vertigomhs

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 1, 2008
Messages
1,231
i was planning on raiding (raid 0) 2x wd6401aals hard drives and i was wondering if it is possible to setup a new raid array without losing all data on the current hard drive i have, the new one is arriving today.

it'll be software raid on the ich10r.

thanks
 
ive been googling around and some people say its possible, with intel application accelerator, which is now intel matrix storage manager, not sure if theyve removed the feature that allows you to make a raid0 without losing your data on the first/main hard drive.

anyone know any more on this?

EDIT: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-029980.htm

seems like it might be possible, but it doesnt specifically mention raid 0.
 
You'd have to ghost your stuff to a temp HD, make the raid, and ghost back, and then deal with adding the raid driver to your existing windows install. Not really that easy.
 
vertigomhs said:
does this still apply to this?

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-029980.htm

says i can just enable raid in my BIOS, and spread the data accross the two hard drives.
Click to expand...

This part kinda struck out at me, hell its in BOLD box ya know.

"Warning" If your RAID controller is not enabled, enabling the RAID controller is not recommended or supported when a SATA hard drive is the boot drive. Enabling the RAID controller may cause an immediate blue screen with an 0x0000007b error code, followed by a reboot. If you wish to enable it, you will need to reinstall the operating system.
 
thesmokingman said:
This part kinda struck out at me, hell its in BOLD box ya know.

"Warning" If your RAID controller is not enabled, enabling the RAID controller is not recommended or supported when a SATA hard drive is the boot drive. Enabling the RAID controller may cause an immediate blue screen with an 0x0000007b error code, followed by a reboot. If you wish to enable it, you will need to reinstall the operating system.
Click to expand...
i dont mind reinstalling the OS, i just need to keep the data that is in a separate partition, but i guess this isnt plausible, i guess ill have to buy some cheap hard drive to backup for this.
 
vertigomhs said:
i dont mind reinstalling the OS, i just need to keep the data that is in a separate partition, but i guess this isnt plausible, i guess ill have to buy some cheap hard drive to backup for this.
Click to expand...

If you don't have a sufficient backup of the data, then I suggest not fooling around with how that data is stored on the drive at the most basic level.
 
ryan_975 said:
If you don't have a sufficient backup of the data, then I suggest not fooling around with how that data is stored on the drive at the most basic level.
Click to expand...
well i was planning on getting a 1tb drive later on to do the backup of the array, but i guess ill have to do that first before setting up the array.
 
nitrobass24 said:
OMFG

Dont do it, you will just lose data.

Also just a side note.
The amount of time you have been looking into this you could have backed up everything.
Created a RADI0
Reinstalled the OS
And restored your DATA.
Click to expand...
i cant backup though, im gonna have to buy a 3rd hard drive now in order to raid 0.
 
vertigomhs said:
i cant backup though, im gonna have to buy a 3rd hard drive now in order to raid 0.
Click to expand...

You should have had the 3rd drive as a backup in place when you went with RAID 0 and put some data on it that you didn't want to lose.
 
[LYL]Homer;1034567451 said:
You should have had the 3rd drive as a backup in place when you went with RAID 0 and put some data on it that you will eventually lose.
Click to expand...

+1 and fixed. ;)

You know why I think they call it "RAID 0"? Because the "0" represents the amount of data you'll be able to recover when one of the disks in your array will fail. If you're going to take the RAID 0 path for better performance, you better make damn sure you have a backup floating around on another drive or storage medium. :)

(I remember some guy on some forum, it may have been this one or Tom's, that absolutely refused to call RAID 0 "RAID 0"; he instead opted it to call "AID 0" because the "R" stands for "Redundant" which is a misnomer when describing RAID 0. :p)
 
thesmokingman said:
Ahem, you actually can recover data from raid 0.
Click to expand...

Have you tried?
Whats your success rate?

if your not doing it yourself the you will pay out the ass for data-recovery.

Your right tho its not Impossible, its just stupid.
 
You can't. I'm assuming your bios isn't raid enabled either right? It's possible using intel's raid manager but you have to have had RAID enabled in your bios BEFORE you installed Windows. Else Windows will fail to boot every time. I was in the same situation as you and I just decided to re-install and format. Much faster and far less of a headache.
 
If you are going to play around with creating a RAID array, just back up your data. Enough said.
 
thesmokingman said:
It's stupid not to try something and instead putting the possibility of it out of reach.

http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032757418&postcount=8
Click to expand...

That thread is discussing recovering a RAID 0 (I do like the "AID 0" thing) array from working disks when the RAID controller (on the mobo) died. You essentially use a RAID recovery program to recreate the array in software.

With RAID 0, your data is split in half between the drives. Chunks 1, 3, 5, etc. are on the first drive, while chunks 2, 4, 6, etc. are on the second drive. If one of the drives dies, you've instantly lost half of the chunks. Imagine opening up your program and deleting every other line out of it. That's what happens when you lose a striped disk. Depending on the stripe size, you may be able to recover some data or even whole files out of the remaining disk (it's very possible that a 10KB file would be completely intact on one disk since your blocks should be larger than that). However, a file that's ten times your block size would have 5 blocks on each disk, meaning you just lost 5/10 of your file.
 
soulesschild said:
You can't. I'm assuming your bios isn't raid enabled either right? It's possible using intel's raid manager but you have to have had RAID enabled in your bios BEFORE you installed Windows. Else Windows will fail to boot every time. I was in the same situation as you and I just decided to re-install and format. Much faster and far less of a headache.
Click to expand...
the windows install i have in there was just temporary any way, i could care less about it.

would i be able to use the matrix manager to spread data (300gb of data in a seperate partition) across the two hard drives and then install windows after?
 
Seriously, back up the data. Use a trial of a free online backup service (just encrypt the archive for safety), use all those spare DVDs as backup medium, find a work computer that you can borrow a shared network drive for a few hours, SOMETHING.

If I understand this correctly, you are still trying to do this data migration in-place. That is unsafe, period, and once it is done the data is even less safe because RAID0 is twice as likely to fail.

Now might be a good time to invest in a backup solution...
 
blast.

I'm sure you guys know this, but 64GB is smaller than it was 5 years ago. :mad: (I remember back when i bought that "massive" 80GB drive).

inspired by [H]'s ICH10r performance results I was hoping that I could just simply raid-0 another 64gb drive in with this one for more space, I guess "simply" was asking for an inch too much. Oh well. Seeing HDtune flat-line at 400MB/s+ will make it well worth it.

and with my new 15mbit connection downloading 25GB of games on steam's only gonna take... what.... 4 and a half hours? god I love my cable company.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top