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lordanthony
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December 19th, 2005 14:00
8400 Raid Recovery
My 8400 came with Raid 0 installed, after one of the infamous Maxtor HD failures resulted in losing everything installed on the system, I had this changed to Raid 1 when Dell replaced the HD. Now, 3 or 4 months later, after my warranty on the system has expired, I had another HD failure (code 7) of the Maxtor that was replaced. At least with Raid 1, can still boot into Windows, I just get startup message that one of the Raid drives is degraded, but the problem I have is that I want to eliminate the use of Raid and just use the remaining drive as a regular HD.
However, if you look at the Raid options (Ctrl I) for removing Raid, they all say that you will lose everything on the hard drive. I thought that was the point of having Raid 1 in the first place, not losing your data. Have done a lot of googling but have not found any information that would explain how I can change from the existing Raid to non-raid without losing everything on the disk. Apparently I could replace the failed disk and rebuild the Raid 1 array but nothing I found tells you how to go from Raid to non-raid without losing the data on the disk!!! Is this correct??? Once you have Raid you are stuck with it??? Any suggestions or references would be greatly appreciated. It is a standard Dim 8400 (no upgrades) purchased in 9/04.
shesagordie
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Posted December 19th, 2005 22:00
lordanthonyThe procedures to break an array are the following.
Boot the system, press CTRL+i [ I ] when indicated to go into the RAID BIOS setup, and set the drives to a non-RAID configuration.
Then if you have RAID 1, you should have 2 hard drives that are exactly the same. For a RAID 0, you would loose all data on the two drives.
Bev.lordanthony
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Posted December 20th, 2005 12:00
Hi, as far as I can tell from the Intel site, Matrix Manager is only the latest version of the Intel Accelerator, it does not give you any additional options in the raid set up screen, you still get a message that all data on the raid volume will be lost.lordanthony
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Posted December 20th, 2005 12:00
Hi, thanks for the response but I have attempted that and as indicated, it tells you you will lose all data on the raid volume, which seems to defeat the purpose of having Raid 1. Just trying to avoid having to reformat and reinstall everything. Of course, the warning may be overly cautious and I may be able to go to a single hard drive without losing anything, just trying to find someone who has gone through this with a raid 1 set up. Most of the stuff on Raid on the internet is either about servers or linux systems.shesagordie
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Posted December 20th, 2005 20:00
lordanthonyThe message saying, the RAID volume data will be lost, is a true statement. But, with RAID 1 you should have two hard drives that are the same, but are no longer a RAID volume. With RAID 0, you would loose all data on both the two hard drives.Bev.Message Edited by shesagordie on 12-20-2005 04:37 PM
Bev is correct: The warrning is about loosing the RAID volume which is true, but the net effect is you end up with two physical drives at the end with the same data that was on the RAID 1 volume.
I have done this twice when re-loading my system with no problem.
CTRL I at power up worked well for me.
- 1) Clone the existing RAID-0 array to the spare 160GB hard disk 2) Reconfigure the system to boot from the spare 160GB hard disk 3) Break the RAID-0 array and reconfigure the array to make it a RAID-1 array 4) Clone the spare 160GB hard disk to the RAID-1 array If your RAID controller supports non-destructively creating a RAID-1 mirror from an existing drive, you can simply forego steps 4: 1) Clone the existing RAID-0 array to the spare 160GB hard disk 2) Reconfigure the system to boot from the spare 160GB hard disk 3) Break the RAID-0 array and reconfigure the array to make the spare 160GB hard disk and additional 160GB hard disk(s) mirror (s)
Using Casper XP
1) Clone the existing RAID-0 array to the spare 160GB hard disk 2) Reconfigure the system to boot from the spare 160GB hard disk 3) Break the RAID-0 array and reconfigure the array to make it a RAID-1 array 4) Clone the spare 160GB hard disk to the RAID-1 array If your RAID controller supports non-destructively creating a RAID-1 mirror from an existing drive, you can simply forego steps 4: 1) Clone the existing RAID-0 array to the spare 160GB hard disk 2) Reconfigure the system to boot from the spare 160GB hard disk 3) Break the RAID-0 array and reconfigure the array to make the spare 160GB hard disk and additional 160GB hard disk(s) mirror (s)
Message Edited by BMWBOB on 12-20-2005 08:13 PM
MopeyMartian
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Posted December 27th, 2005 17:00
Wow, is anyone reading the same thread? He wants to go from RAID 1 to no RAID at all without losing everything. The RAID 0 is long gone. From what I've found there's no way to break the RAID without killing everything. Be sure to back up the important stuff.
For true tech support go to www.Deviantforums.com.
ejn63
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Posted December 19th, 2005 14:00