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Breaking a RAID 1 mirror

M

mrfunk

Junior Member
Hello. I currently am running a 500GB RAID 1 mirror on an ASUS P5Ld2 built in RAID controller.

I will be getting a new system soon, and will need to break the mirror (will not be using RAID in the new system, which most likely has a different, incompatible, controller anyway). Not sure how to do this and keep the existing data intact. I can get another 500GB drive and copy the contents to it first and is what I'm thinking about doing to be safe, but was wondering if anyone has any tips on doing this.

I assume it should be able to be broken and retain the data, as it would/should do if one of the drives actually failed. I don't see anything in the docs specifically on how to do this, though. The only thing I see is:

-Deleting the RAID volume: all data is lost on the drives
-Resetting the HDDs to non-RAID: All internal RAID structure on the volume is deleted (but doesn't say anything about the actual data).

Could it be as simple as just hooking one of the drives up to the new system?

Thanks,
Thomas
 
Originally posted by: mrfunk
Hello. I currently am running a 500GB RAID 1 mirror on an ASUS P5Ld2 built in RAID controller.

I will be getting a new system soon, and will need to break the mirror (will not be using RAID in the new system, which most likely has a different, incompatible, controller anyway). Not sure how to do this and keep the existing data intact. I can get another 500GB drive and copy the contents to it first and is what I'm thinking about doing to be safe, but was wondering if anyone has any tips on doing this.

I assume it should be able to be broken and retain the data, as it would/should do if one of the drives actually failed. I don't see anything in the docs specifically on how to do this, though. The only thing I see is:

-Deleting the RAID volume: all data is lost on the drives
-Resetting the HDDs to non-RAID: All internal RAID structure on the volume is deleted (but doesn't say anything about the actual data).

Could it be as simple as just hooking one of the drives up to the new system?

Thanks,
Thomas
Click to expand...

Because RAID1 drives are exact duplicates, you can pull either drive and data will remain intact. When you plug it into another computer, it will just ignore the metadata used to identify that drive to the RAID controller. You can plug this drive into an existing OS install and it will see the drive ok, assuming that it can read the file structure. Example: plugging a Linux formatted ext2 drive into Windows will not work because Windows cannot read that format, but plugging a NTFS drive in a newer Linux distro install will work ok.

Now, you cannot format and install an OS onto the drive and expect to retain the data!
 
Is there a Windows install on the RAID array? As ch33zwiz notes, if you are going to be trying to transfer Windows, there will be some other issues that need to be taken into account before doing the transfer.

But, yeah, you can often just plug a RAID 1 single drive into a non-RAID controller and have it work.
 
Thanks for the replies. It's just plain data on this array (XP, ntfs), no OS. I was hoping it would be that easy. I just wasn't sure what kind of RAID structure was on the drives, and if that would cause any issues reading it on another system (XP or Vista) without removing the RAID info first.
 
Quick note, there is a program that can give ext2/3 support to windows (not the disk management console, unfortunately)
 
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