How does RAID work?

[glitch]

I've currently got a 80GB Hitachi Deskstar as my main drive and two 250GB Samsung Spinpoint drives running in RAID 1, using the NVidia RAID functionality of my Asus A8N-SLI Premium.

What would happen if I were to wipe everything off my main drive and re-install Windows? Would I be able to rebuild the RAID array without losing any of the data?

Sorry if this is a bit of a stupid question, but I had a nightmare getting RAID working in the first place and not sure how it really works!

 

[glitch]

Oooh err. Bit worried about the potential for data loss here! Might have to borrow an external hard-drive to back the data up before I try anything, unless anyone knows 100% for sure if it will work?

And of course, many thanks to both rpstewart and mosfet for their input so far.