RAID array in a new motherboard

[tinkeng]

I have two disks set up as a RAID 1 array (mirroring) via the on-board RAID controller of an Asus P8P67 board. And recently my less than week old motherboard broke down and had to go to RMA. Will I be able to restore the raid array without having to wipe the disks when connecting them to a new mobo?

And if I don't RAID them, will they be visible in windows as separate drive letters, so that I can at least access the data in this way?

I gues what I'm ultimately wondering is how I can access the data with a new board.

 

[corkyg]

To really be safe, back up that RAID 1 array to a single drive. Then just rebuild the array and restore that data to it. I keep all my data on a RAID1 array, and periodically clone it to a USB external. I have, in the past, upgraded the array with larger drives. I just rebuild the array with the new drives, and then clone the data from one of the old drives to the new array. Never a problem.

 

[Diogenes2]

Backing up the array might be a problem at this point..

OP

I believe when you attach the drives to the new MOBO , it will see them as they were on the old board..

Just to be safe you might try one drive, and see if it sees it as a broken RAID . It should still boot into windows, showing as a broken array, then when you attach the 2nd drive it will re-build..

 

[tinkeng]

Thank you for your replies. Luckily, the RAID array wasn't a boot disk, just storage. If I understand you correctly, the disks themselves "remember" that they're part of a RAID array? That information isn't stored with the controller? And re-building a raid array won't wipe the disks?

That is sweet, thank you.

 

[mv2devnull]

If I understand you correctly, the disks themselves "remember" that they're part of a RAID array? And re-building a raid array won't wipe the disks?

No rebuild and definitely no "Create array".

The information about the array (metadata) is indeed written to each member disk of the array. The "controller" does and knows essentially nothing. Different fake-raid vendors have used different metadata formats, and even stored the metadata on different spot on the drive. Software raids show similar variation (Linux software raid formats allow placing metadata to end, start, 4k from start, ...).

What you have to do with the replacement motherboard is to attach the disks and turn the "RAID mode" on (boards tend to have "IDE mode" as default). There should be no need to go into the RAID "Setup". This assuming that the replacement board is of same type, ie with same/compatible Intel "RAID" chip.

In the Spring, the first revision Sandy Bridge chipset had an error and boards were replaced. Transfer of mirrored array from one P8P67 Pro to another was trivial, IIRC.


Well, a rebuild might be necessary, if the board breakdown left the array dirty -- crash in the middle of write and no same "last write timestamp" on both drives. But that should occur automatically, once the raid driver takes control (fake-raids are basically software). Rebuild simply mirrors content of one drive to the other. However, even if array is coherent to begin with, there might still be filesystem errors from interrupted (but properly mirrored) writes.