Disable RAID without data loss? 1

[JimSeason]

I have an Asus M4A79XTD EVO mobo with two SATA 1T drives in a RAID mirroring configuration. I want to disable/delete the RAID without losing any data on the source drive. The manual warns data loss will occur if the RAID is disabled/deleted. My goal is to switch to W7 mirroring on these two drives.


I'm not satisfied until you're not satisfied.

(A paraphrase of DeMotivators)

 

[rclarke250]

Why would you want to switch from a hardware mirror to a software mirror? Functionally it's the same.

 

[DrB0b]

Id have to ask the same question stated above. Also, what functionality advantage do you gain software RAID vs hardware?

Heres a very basic rundown:

http://www.raidrecoveryguide.com/hardware-software.html

"Silence is golden, duct tape is silver...

 

[goombawaho]

I wanted to ask the same question but people usually hate it when they ask a question and someone answers with their own idea instead of a solution to your problem.

With that said - Yeah, Why?? In no way would software mirroring be better, easier to recover from a hard drive failure or faster than hardware RAID 1.

 

[stduc]

To answer the OPs question - I don't think you can do this without a full re-install. You may get away with taking an image backup, breaking the RAID, restoring the image to a single disk and then using W7 to build a software RAID.

But I concur - why?

P.S.

If it is a RAID 1 (Mirror) then there will be no data loss.

 

[DrB0b]

Please correct me because I have heard this but not tried.

With a RAID 1 setup, you can remove the Mirror, reformat it and drop the RAID, while switching the BIOS settings boot from the Main drive. Is that accurate or falsities? Supposedly done without data loss.

"Silence is golden, duct tape is silver...

 

[stduc]

DrBob True
With RAID 1 (mirror) both drives are effectively identical. So you can shut down, remove one of the drives, ensure it is set to master and reconfigure the BIOS. You can then take the removed drive and do what you like with it. Even put it in another, hopefully identical machine and it will boot.

 

[DrB0b]

Thanks for confirming and that should then be the answer to the OP's question. He can do that, format one and then reintroduce to the system and software RAID if he/she wants.

Still not sure as to the reason behind wanting to though..... hopefully the OP will chime in.

"Silence is golden, duct tape is silver...

 

[JimSeason]

The client "feels" like software RAID might be better as far monitoring goes. He is also considering moving to a backup scenario. The bottom line is he wants to know what's going on all the time. My experience with RAID has all been on Novell servers doing duplexed mirroring which was flawless in my experience.

I'm not satisfied until you're not satisfied.

(A paraphrase of DeMotivators)

 

[goombawaho]

I did mirroring on Novell servers and it WAS flawless UNTIL one drive died and then the server wouldn't boot because the drive still running didn't have the DOS partition and NWSERVER folder on it to boot from!!!

So, you had to either have the entire DOS partition mirrored by periodically doing a DOS prompt XCOPY from drive to drive to make sure things were manually mirrored because the mirroring didn't cover the DOS partition. Geeeeezzzzzz, what a pain.

No way that that was better than when I switched to RAID5 or RAID1 via a controller.

You should gently kick this person in the rear and steer him to the light. RAID has hardware monitoring so you can look at the log or the "Windows RAID Manager" for the specific card and you can see what's going on.

 

[goombawaho]

By the way, from my Windows 2000 server days, I recall that software mirroring does NOT allow you to boot after one drive fails without taking some action to specify the boot device. It's not just automagic, like with a hardware RAID>

Not sure if that is still true on a Windows 7 software RAID.