Mobo just died - RAID help needed!

NF7-S

NF7-S

NF7-S

Soldato
Joined
25 Oct 2003
Posts
6,164
hi guys, many moons ago I used to haunt this place and was a bit of an overclocking guru (well AMD - I co-wrote the original 'beginners guide to overclocking') however after a while went AWOL due to family stuff.

Anyway, introductions over, I currently have a K8N-E which is refusing to boot up, I have tried restting the bois and changing the PSu with no joy (old PSU = dead and new PSU = splash screen only).

I believe my mobo is dead/dying and currently run the machine in RAID 10/0+1/1+0 (whatever you want to call it - it's 4 80GB SATA drives stripped and mirrored to give me 160GB usable).

Sooo...basically, I'm not great with RAID - I once had to replace a HDD and ended up losing all my data :( and am basically s**ting myself about the possability of having to migrate to a new mobo.

In essence this is several questions in one, and any advice offered is greatly appreciated. So, I'd like to know the best way to migrate, which mobos I should look at (cheap please as the PC is not longer used for gaming/video editing) and any other tips etc.

Many thanks in advance :cool:
 
After a quick google, I presume you're using the Silicon Image controller?

Any cheap 4 port SATA RAID card will probably use the same controller and should pick up the array.
 
thanks guys - jellybeard999...erm, I think so! lol

I'm using whatever came with the mobo, that sounds like the one...but as I said I'm no expert.

Before (when I tried to replace a faulty HDD) I probably just screwed it up by not fully understanding the options. I'm currently tracking a built PC with MSI K8N Diamond mobo which looks to have very similar setup to my Asus...tho it's currently not set for RAID.

I hope to xfer my HDDs (I numbered the drives so fingers crossed those numbers are the current ones) - I just doubt my skills in this area, so any help advice is appreciated.

Thanks again :)
 
If it's critical data on the hard drives, could I suggest taking a disk images of them before you start trying to attach them to a new raid controller, just in case something goes wrong. That way you can always go back to square one.

Looks like your mobo has 2 sata ports off the nForce3 chipset, and another 4 off a Sil3114. As jellybeard999 says, if all your disks are connected to the Sil3114 ports (all grouped together, and in red if the photos I've found are correct) then a cheap pci card should do the job to get the data off... I've got one here in a spare pc and seem to remember having to flash it with either a RAID or non-RAID BIOS so you might want to check that out before conncting disks up.
 
thanks again.

just managed to snap up a working PC with an MSI K8N mobo so hope to try and salvage with that...fingers crossed...
 
OK, so I managed to sort this yesterday.

I had numbered the drive after my last mess-up, altho these numbers didn't match the on board numbers (i.e. HDD1 was not in socket 1) - I decided to run with the HDD numbered order. I noticed the RAID software on the new mobo seemed a lot more user friendly - and allowed me to rebuild the RAID quite easily.

Thankfully I had a spare HDD - so I built XP onto that and had the PC boot into it - having istalled all the drivers it 'found' the RAID and all my data was present and correct! :)

Many thanks to everyones input :)
 
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