Moving RAID to a another system?

[macrospect]

Im going to kep this short. My night has been a mess and it is now 3:30 in the morning (basically I am tired as hell).

My Asus P4C800-E board took a dump tonight, to the point where it is fried. So I just bought a new one from the egg. However I have a raid 0 setup arrayed across 2 80GB drives. Theres data that I need to get off of them.

Is it possible to take my raid setup and still keep it intact with the new (EXACT SAME) board that I just bought?

As in, can I just plug my drives into the replacment board and have them work without destroying my array?

Thanks. Off to bed now.

 

[ilkhan]

raid 0? good luck.
No problem at all with R1, as its just the exact same data. But with it bring striped...
I find it funny that anybody would put critical data on a R0 array, but whatever. Im the guy that ran R1 for over a year and now R5. paranoid...

 

[Dark Prodigy]

I've never had to transfer a RAID array before but it seems logical that since you always set up the RAID array in the BIOS before formatting (if installing new), and since you already have your drives partitioned with information on them, it seems they would be intact after transfer....
Just configure your RAID in the BIOS and boot from it like normal. Your motherboard will recognize your HDD's in a striped array and will access it as so. Your windows should boot up normally across both HDD's because of the information already on it...

Doesn't hurt to give it a try...

 

[Rocco123]

Should be no problem at all. You might have to create another volume in the RAID setup, but if you do this, just make sure to NOT initialize the volume when you create it.

 

[mwarps]

If you know the stripe size, and it's the same controller on the new board, it should work, you'll just have to set it up in the new board, and as the previous poster said, don't initialize it.

 

[macrospect]

Morning all,

Thanks for all of the replies. I wont be able to do much at this point (until my new board comes). However, it is indeed the exact some chip that will be controlling the RAID array (If you care it is an Intel ICH5R RAID controller). I also used the default stripe size of 64kb. I will make sure not to initialize it. Thanks for letting me know so or I would have done so and lost my array.

Ill post back here when I get my replacment.

Thanks again!

 

[macrospect]

UPDATE:

Well I spent a good 12 hours yesterday reinstallnig everytnhing into my computer.

I also made a little mistake. When I received the Asus box I noticed it was printed in a different color, and had a slightly different design than my old P4C800-E board. It never dawned on me that it might have been a different model! Yes I made a error in ordering 4AM. I bought the P4P800-E board. As it turns out the P4C800-E was discontinued. This board is still nice although it does have a few minor flaws. The P4 connector is higher up on the board (and of course the cable was too short so I had to extend it (on a side note anyone ever try and remove those P4 pins/ATX pins? Not fun at all!)). Also, the floppy drive connector is backwards on the board (something not too major but its bad if you like to keep your case neat like me). Lastly, the RAM slots have some big issues. You cannot open them when a graphics card is in there. Luckily I rarely take my RAM out.

Now, since this was a different board I was expecting my RAID would be all screwed up. Nope! As soon as I fired it up it detected the array... and failed to load XP. Lost some system files, as well as had a corrupt MBR. So I had to reinstall XP (Repair it), enough to get my files back. After I reinstalled XP I got all of my files and decided to format (I dont like using the repair option all that much).

So, here I am a fully working board and RAID array.

Thanks for the contributions to this thread!