Moving a healthy RAID 0 array to a new mobo

[Pi_Masta]

Alright I'm new here, but I've done some searching and haven't really figured out what to do with my situation and this forum's name seems to be the most appropriate place to ask it, so here goes.

The situation:
2x WD Caviar 250GB in RAID-0 Array through a RocketRaid100 PCI Card, originally on an Intel 850MV board (yes that ancient thing) and now trying to get it to work on an ASUS K8V board.

First off, this isn't my system drive, so no worrying about the MBR (atleast I don't think there should be a reason to) or anything like that. They are simply 2 healthy drives with RAID 0 data on them connected the same way to the same PCI card. Essentially what happened was the Video Card finally bit the dust on the old board and I finally upgraded to this one. I've already re-installed windows on a separate drive as usual and I knew this RAID array was going to be a pain in the rear.

The PCI card already recognizes the two drives as being in an array and even has the same name for the RAID array. However, windows (XP w/SP3) claims it can't read anything on the drive (right clicking on the drive and hitting properties says its a 0 byte drive). In the disk management, though, it gives the correct size of the array and in fact when I first went into disk management it asked me if I wanted to initialize a disk, after looking and seeing I couldn't do much else with it I went ahead had had it initialize. Well apparently the drive it initialized was the secondary drive on the RAID array, the one that is suppose to be hidden.

The interesting thing is that disk management says the ~500 GB 'drive' (the actual array) is healthy and is active (though I believe I made active thinking it might help). The properties for the 'F:' drive as it has been assigned as I said state it's a 0 byte disk with a RAW format. I'm pretty sure it was just an NTFS formatted drive on the hardware RAID 0 hard drives.

The question:
Surely I can get the data back on these two drives since they are using the same RAID controller and working perfectly fine. To me it just seems like windows isn't mounting the drive correctly. Anyone know what to do or any ideas on what to do to get my drive and data back?

I have a feeling its something relatively simple and don't want to reformat the drive if I don't have to as it would be a lot of data I'd have to re-download.

Thanks in advance,

[rchadwick]

This is super easy. Simply format the drives and rebuild the RAID. Since this was a RAID0, I'm sure you only used it for scratch memory, since a 500Gb RAID0 is a really bad way to store any kind of important data. Ignoring for a second the underlying reliability issues, it would be safest to buy a 500Gb drive, transfer everything to it, rebuild the RAID, and copy everything back. However, you really should just keep it on the 500GB drive. I wouldn't even use the RAID0 as a backup. If your downloading time is important to you, keep your Porn and Warez on a single drive, or a different RAID config.

[BlackST]

Rchadwick is amazing! He can see the drives content thru a post

[thatdellguy]

Simple: Using the old MB, backup the data to another drive since its not your boot drive and recreate the raid on the new motherboard. As easy as pie. Damn...now i'm hungry...

[Pi_Masta]

Heh, I wish it was that simple but you see I've already re-installed windows over the install for the old motherboard, that is the install of windows that was working and seeing the drive is gone and replaced by the one I'm using now.

I've thought of trying it that way but you see I'd have to:

1. Install/plug in the old motherboard
2. re-install windows
3. install drivers for the RAID card and a network card (unless I can find a large enough external HDD to borrow)
4. cross my fingers that it can now find the data and mount the drive properly
5. find some place to store all that info and transfer it
6. plug in the new motherboard
7. format the RAID array
8. transfer all that data back
9. and finally take a nap from exhaustion

I honestly don't have much faith in the plan since I don't think the change in the motherboard is the issue (though I'm not 100% sure, that's why I'm here). It's the same RAID card connected to the same drives, just windows won't read it through the card.

A RAID card shouldn't change how it works just because it's put into a different motherboard should it?

All this might be moot now as I've been fiddling with diskpart.exe and I think I may have screwed myself. I noticed it had a volume listed on the primary drive as the correct size but didn't have the secondary drive listed. I thought that maybe deleting the volume and recreating it would solve the problem but I don't think it did and instead wiped all the volume information off the drive and I have a feeling I won't be able to recreate it. I'm gonna wait a couple days and see if anyone has another solution, if not I guess it's formatting time.

Thanks,

[Daisy Woo]

Do you need the data on this RAID system ? If so, you are now looking at data recovery.