Transferring Raid 0 drives between computers?

Elston15

Elston15

Elston15

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I just need someone to verify this as I am pretty sure, BUT :confused: if I transfer two striped hard drives, raid 0, onto a new motherboard, cpu etc.

Is it possible to plug in the drives, set up the RAID again, and enable the drive in Windows, and instantly have access to all the data OR will I be best off just backing the data up, formatting the drives setting up a new RAID and putting the data back onto the drives?

I am currently on a nforce4 chipset and using nvidia's onbard RAID chip, and I will be moving to a X58 1366 board, as the mobo's RAID chipset's are different I believe I will have go down the second route and format the drives. If anyone has any experince on this or has a definitive answer, please enlighten me.

P.S. this is largely an academic argument as I am going to back up all the data anyway before transferring, but it got me wondering...
 
Sometimes it's possible to move an array from one board to another but it only works if the controllers are from the same family. Going from NVidia to Intel won't work.
 
Can't you just image the current RAID pack as it is and the create a new pack on the new mobo and dump the image back on?
 
For the OS drive it will have different controller drivers, nVidia versus Intel. This means Windows won't load and it will just BSOD. Unless you can find a way to install the Intel drivers before you take the image then it's a re-install or at least a repair.

Imaging may very well work if it was only data drives.
 
A lot of imaging software lets you add to an image once you have captured it. Perhaps it could be added that way.

If it is Windows 7 it may already have the drivers built-in.
 
Win 7 does have them built in, but it won't load them up at boot time unless it was setup with that config - it will still try to boot as though it's an nVidia RAID - and will BSOD.

A repair might fix it though.
 
Thanks for the replies, I think the safiest way is to just back the data up and format. That will also force me to go through all my files and organize/sort them and get rid of all the trash I have collected, something I have been putting off for a while.
 
Almost definatly won't work IMO - I've had arrays unrecognised even by different revisions of the same controller let alone different controllers.
 
It's generally a bad idea to just switch motherboards without reinstalling Windows imo, so much changes with board components and their "location" that even if it doesn't BSOD instantly I'd be concerned about stability. And that's even without the RAID in the equation.
 
Just to clarify, its not a system drive, I will be installing a new copy of windows on another hard drive. These raided drives are purely data storage.
 
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