Recovering a Raid 0 setup.

plasmahal · 27 May 2010 at 08:05

I have recently lost my motherboard which was setup to have 2 raptor drives in Raid 0.

I have a replacement motherboard on the way but a different chipset and manufacturer.

Will it be possible to recover the Raid 0 array?

Temi_D · 27 May 2010 at 08:34

It is possible to recover it but i've never done it. Someone here should be able to help. You can try searching for it because a question like this has been posted before

plasmahal · 27 May 2010 at 10:14

My old motherboard had the Intel® ICH9R raid chipset and the new one has ICH10, both using the intel matrix storage technology.

fingers crossed.

all my critical data is backed up, just wanted to recover some stuff before formatting and re-installing windows again.

rpstewart · 27 May 2010 at 10:28

ICH9R to ICH10R should be possible, they're as close to a like for like swap as you're going to get.

Just set the SATA controller to RAID mode in the BIOS and plug in the drives. Let the RAID BIOS detect what's on them rather than going into the RAID config and forcing it (this might set up a new array and wipe the drives)

plasmahal · 27 May 2010 at 12:51

rpstewart said:
ICH9R to ICH10R should be possible, they're as close to a like for like swap as you're going to get.

Just set the SATA controller to RAID mode in the BIOS and plug in the drives. Let the RAID BIOS detect what's on them rather than going into the RAID config and forcing it (this might set up a new array and wipe the drives)

That was my cunning plan..... thanks...

Jakus · 27 May 2010 at 14:31

Should work fine !, but fully back up that array first and I bet You it's guaranteed to work 100%

plasmahal · 27 May 2010 at 20:50

Well it hasn't worked out as expected. rebuilt the machine, booted first time only to find this is a non raid mobo...........

As i stated earlier, its got ICH10 but needs ICH10R.

I'll be on the phone to the OCUK guys tomorrow to find out my options, basically I need something like the GA-EP45-UD3LR Intel P45.

JonJ678 · 27 May 2010 at 21:16

Or just do the raid in software. That way changing motherboard doesn't matter, I moved a raid 5 across three different boards with no fuss whatsoever. ICH10 is fine for this.

I think windows can boot from software raid, but someone else will need to tell you how.

Congratulations on having backups, most threads with this title lead with "I know I should have backed up but..."

gamesaregood · 27 May 2010 at 21:35

JonJ678 said:
Or just do the raid in software. That way changing motherboard doesn't matter, I moved a raid 5 across three different boards with no fuss whatsoever. ICH10 is fine for this.

I think windows can boot from software raid, but someone else will need to tell you how.

Congratulations on having backups, most threads with this title lead with "I know I should have backed up but..."

Which motherboard / raid controllers did you move it over and what was the procedure?

Considering Setting up a Raid 5 for my more important data / files and loosing it in a motherboard change is my largest concern.

unknownsock · 28 May 2010 at 02:46

Mine failed the other week, i was able to boot up from another disk and used the program undelete.
It can virtually rebuild arrays temporarily for recovery, although i didn't need that the program could see my array instantly when every other option couldn't.

plasmahal · 28 May 2010 at 07:44

I put in a spare 80Gb sata drive last night and installed win7.

Don't know about Software Raid, anyone care to enlighten me?

Temi_D · 28 May 2010 at 15:49

JonJ678 said:
...I think windows can boot from software raid, ...

Windows cannot boot from software raid.

But i made a thread about software RAID, you might find it useful.http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18128402

JonJ678 · 28 May 2010 at 16:04

gamesaregood said:
Which motherboard / raid controllers did you move it over and what was the procedure?

Originally assembled on an Asus p5e-vm hdmi (ICH9R), moved to P5Q premium (ICH10R), then ECS GF8100VM-M5 (NVIDIA MCP78V), finally Gigabyte's X58 UD5 (also ich10r iirc).

Four disks, no hot spares, assembled under ubuntu 8.04 using mdadm. There's a wiki page on this for most operating systems, I used a generic one. Or man mdadm is also good.

Moving it over featured unplugging the drives, plugging them into the new board in arbitrary order, then running mdadm --assemble --disks=4 --uuid=xxx /dev/md0 && mount /dev/md0 /mnt/data. Doubtless I've got the commands slightly off, I don't have mdadm installed at present. It was consistently a single line, then mount though. I ran it with 3 out of 4 disks for ages too, excellent system. Doesn't need any particular hardware. It does however need you to run some varient of unix, and uses the cpu for parity calculations.

Decreased performance relative to a raid card is well worth it considering that a dead motherboard doesn't cost you all your data, but a dead card may well do. I'm more than happy to dig out my notes on it if you're interested (and not running windows, which I know nothing about).

Temi_D said:
Windows cannot boot from software raid.

Fail by windows then. I suppose I'm not surprised. Thanks for the link.

plasmahal · 1 Jun 2010 at 13:04

Well,

I fitted the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR Intel P45 and activated the RAID function and.....

It all booted up fine.

Windows 7 seemed to sort itself out drivers wise, but I have installed the latest drivers from the gigabyte website.

I'll see how it goes for a bit as i know it's normally best to format and re-install again.

but at the moment it's seems fine.