P4C800-E Deluxe and RAID

[snoopy]

Is it possible to change the RAID configuration after it's been defined,
without losing existing data?

I've got 2 SATA drives on the Intel in a RAID0 setup. Can I "unstripe" them
into a regular drive and then create a RAID1 setup?

 

[Chris]

I am about to build a new PC using the same m/b with twin 160Gb
Barracuda SATA drives and have been weighing up the pros and cons of
RAID 0 with the Intel controller and RAID 1 with the Promise. I have
read a few derogatory comments on this site about the Promise RAID
controller. What is prompting your change and do you have any advice
please?

 

[snoopy]

I had originally set up two stripe sets (one on Intel and one on Proimise).
Yesterday one of the drives on the Promise stripe set appears to have died
or at least the stripe set isn't seeing it any more. So I have lost
everything on that 400GB striped drive. Since it was rather new and I
haven't had a chance to put much on it, I didn't lose all that much. But it
is rather unnerving that a new 200GB drive croacked on me. I'm wondering if
I can "unstripe" my other set and convert it to a shadow set in case I
should suffer another drive failure. It's my system drive so I'd rather not
reload if at all possible. Seems like there should be such a utility. As
far as I can tell at this point, any changes to this stripe set will result
in a complete loss of data. I'm hoping somebody can tell me this is not so!

 

[FairMan]

No you can't

FairMan

 

[Tim]

The best method is to use a product such as ghost or drive image to create
an image of the drive and then reload it. In your case this probably won't
work as a RAID 0 of 2 x size x GB drives won't fit onto 1 drive of size x
(either a single drive or mirrored).

That is assuming that you ahve 1 partition covering all of the stripe. You
could use a product such as partition magic to reduce the size of the
partition such that it would fit onto one drive, then image the single
partition off then back onto newly created mirrored drive pair - that would
work.

As you no doubt know by now, system drives should *never* be striped. It is
suicide.

Don't be surprised to find that the 'failed' drive in the strip passes all
hardware tests and has no new defects on - this is the nature of raid. In a
non reaid 0 config, the principle task of raid is to protect data from
corruption, so having drives chucked out by the raid is normal.

- Tim