Will reinstalling cause data loss?

Buchanan0204 · 8 May 2011 at 02:40

I know the thread title is stupid. However I couldn't think of a better one.

Basically what I want to know is. I have two drives in raid 1 on a startech controller card. The drives were formatted within windows disk management with the gpt partition table as both drives are 2TB.

If I reinstall my os on my main drives in raid 0 off the motherboards sata controller. Will I lose the partition setup on the drives. I know the data wont actually be lost... however will it become inaccessible?

If it will, how can I prevent this. I really should know the answer to this myself, however sometimes these things get you thinking.

Cheers guys.

hazman8 · 8 May 2011 at 02:41

I don't know raid

Surveyor · 8 May 2011 at 02:53

hazman8 said:
I don't know raid

A man should know his limitations

Buchanan0204 · 8 May 2011 at 03:23

Surveyor said:
A man should know his limitations

Saturday night drinking seems to have gotten the better of our fellow OCer

Buchanan0204 · 8 May 2011 at 22:01

Anyone?

oliver2601 · 8 May 2011 at 23:25

Assuming you have all the data I'm guessing there would be a way to do it... assuming my understanding of raid is correct in that it's "one for me and one for you".

honosuseri · 9 May 2011 at 01:00

Without wanting to sound rude, it's poor practice not to have a backup drive for your data. I'm assuming you have used raid to combine the drives into one rather than clone one to the other.

It would be wise to invest in another drive, just ask yourself what if one of those drives had failed. Then you would have definately lost the data.

edit scratch that just seen u said raid 1......its late im tired and misread

philjohn · 9 May 2011 at 08:17

honosuseri said:
edit scratch that just seen u said raid 1......its late im tired and misread

Please repeat after me: RAID != backup

As to the original question, from reading your description it sounds as it you've got the following:

2x Drives in RAID 0 attached to motherboard
2x 2TB Drivers in RAID 1 attached to controller.

If you're just wiping the RAID 0 drives and reinstalling there then the other drives will be fine. I tend to remove my data drive from the SATA ports so that I'm sure nothing happens during a reinstall, so that may be an idea.

edscdk · 9 May 2011 at 08:24

honosuseri said:
edit scratch that just seen u said raid 1......its late im tired and misread

so remind me how raid helps after you delete a folder, a power failure corrupts a file, your PC is stolen, or NTFS goes a bit mental?

anyway hardware raid will survive an OS reinstall.

edscdk · 9 May 2011 at 08:27

edscdk said:
anyway hardware raid will survive an OS reinstall.

that is you will need to do nothing if its hardware raid, its the same as a single hard drive no matter what the configuration, hardware raid is your friend..

software raid will not survive a OS reinstall and will need some sort of re-config... software raid is not your friend

if the OS controlls the raid its software, if the raid is set up on the controller is hardware

Buchanan0204 · 9 May 2011 at 22:56

edscdk said:
that is you will need to do nothing if its hardware raid, its the same as a single hard drive no matter what the configuration, hardware raid is your friend..

software raid will not survive a OS reinstall and will need some sort of re-config... software raid is not your friend

if the OS controlls the raid its software, if the raid is set up on the controller is hardware

Thanks' for that. I was pretty sure that was the case. However I wasn't in the mood for a sneaky surprise.

Cheers for clearing that up.

With regards to the guy who went ahead to lecture me on backing up data. Don't worry about it. We all have our off days