I Current have three hard drives: One 40 GB hard disk which houses my OS (vista 86x) and two 500 GB hard disks setup in Raid 1.

My question is; If my main 40GB hard disk were to fail and If i were to replace it with a new hard drive and installed vista, would it recognize the setup I originally had and allow me to access my files on the RAID 1? Or would it require me to reformat the hard drives... rendering my current RAID1 setup useless

Thanks

First question.... is the RAID setup inside windows... or was it done on the mainboard?

If it was on the mainboard you should NOT have one ounce of problems migrating to another drive.

If however, it is setup within windows, the raid will not migrate.However, as you are using RAID-1 which is mirror. you can happily boot up both drives and VISTA will detect them as seperate drives with the exact same info on them. From there you can wipe one drive, then setup the RAID-1 in vista again through disk management. VISTA will happily copy all the data from active drive to the recently wiped one and therefore recreating your array. One drive once again.

Thanks for peace of mind! To answer the question, I had set up the RAID in bios (I have nvida nforce chipset)

I originally had xp and when i switched over to vista it made me break the RAID and reformat the drives, in order for vista to recognize the setup. I was worried this would be the case if my current hard drive would fail, resulting in me reinstalling vista on a new HD... which is inevitable.

I would have thought that you wouldnt have had to break it for xp > Vista either... Myabe something different formatting wise did that, but Vista is still backward compatible with XP formatting? im confused by that one.

Which chip set do you have? NF3 Raid and Vista are not a match. Forget-a-bout it.

I have a NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI mobo. I don't think it has the NF3 RAID chipset..

Since it was my Second time setting up a RAID 1 on a fresh install... i might of messed it up