No Raid to Raid?.....Re-installing Raid

P

pattt

New Member
Hi!

I have a PC with two Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard drive running on a M2N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard. I had the motherboard's raid 1 (Mirror) installed on those drives as my data is pretty important to me. I updated my BIOS two days ago and windows didn't wanna start anymore.

I then removed raid and unplugged one of my drives. So I only have one of the drives plugged in to keep the copy of my old one. I reinstalled windows and everything works great. I plugged my old drive in to copy the data to my new windows installation.

Now my question is: I want to reinstall raid 1. Will it erase my data when I tell my bios to raid my drives? If not how will it know which drive to copy from? (Probobly the one that's set as primary in bios?)

THANK YOU!
Patrick
 
Thank you, I have backed up my important content to a 3rd drive so I will test out my raid setup utility. Thank you Cromewell
 
raid 1 you would need to go into the raid bios and choose to rebuild the raid manually.

your other option would be to build a raid 5 which requires three hard drives, but if one fails it will always rebuild itself (unless multiple drives fail) and that would give you the least down time and best data security. though you should still have back ups over that.
 
Raid 5... That would be amazing... Only if my 3rd hard drive was the same :(

Yes that is what could of been done (rebuild the raid and choose from which drive) although I figured that out too late. I had already backed up my data and I'm formating both of my hard drives (using raid 1) to get a new clean drives. I'll then install windows on one partition and put all my backup data on an other partition.

Although raid might backup the drive, if the problem is not physical, such as a drive failing, then raid is "live" so it copies the logical problem to the other drives. Darn that means I'll probably need to keep an extra hard drives for scheduled backups.

Thanks for the help!
 
you can set up your raid to mirror at times if the controller supports it. for example our mirrors actually only mirror each other every 5 hours. Meaning if something goes awry, we have about a 5 hour window we can salvage data from before we have to pull it from tape.
 
Really?! That's amazing! I don't think my controller enables that?... Anyone know? Motherboard Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe it has a built in controller.
 
my guess is you would have to buy a real raid controller with more options. I don't think that built in ones support that feature.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top