Transfer RAID-0 Array?

[Track]

Okay, so I think my 680i SLi motherboard has reached the end of its days.

I have enough vital data on RAID 0 arrays on the board to warrant suicide.. or at least listening to a Bob Marley album.

I have heard that it is possible to transfer a RAID 0 array from one controller to the same, on a different motherboard. Such as going from a 680i SLi motherboard to a 750i SLi.

So, is this possible? If so, how is it done? When I create a new array, it automatically asks me to erase the data on the two drives, correct?

Thank You!

 

[pat]

you don't have to create a new array, all you have to do is to plug in the array and enable RAID in BIOS. The controller will look for the RAID data on the drive and configure itself.

 

[Track]

And you're sure this will work?

With what chipsets?!

 

[sub mesa]

I have enough vital data on RAID 0 arrays on the board to warrant suicide..

If that's the case, no other option exists than buying new disks and transferring the data there so you have at least 2 valid copies of your "vital" data.

Any other option would always have the risk of something going wrong, and having crucial data without any backup or redundancy is a big no-no to begin with.

 

[Track]

I have enough vital data on RAID 0 arrays on the board to warrant suicide..

If that's the case, no other option exists than buying new disks and transferring the data there so you have at least 2 valid copies of your "vital" data.

Any other option would always have the risk of something going wrong, and having crucial data without any backup or redundancy is a big no-no to begin with.

Um.. how exactly am I supposed to back up my data without a motherboard?

I just need to know what is the cheapest board I can buy that will sustain my RAID 0 arrays. What is it - 610i, 630i.. maybe even nForce 4?!

 

[sub mesa]

You can do two things:

- buy a motherboard of the same chipset so you can migrate your existing RAID without any form of backup (dangerous)
- recover your RAID using read-only techniques and put it on new harddrives (safe)

The second option would work with any chipset, preferably those who do not support RAID, using any Linux or BSD system. For example, Ubuntu Linux would recognise your nVidia MediaShield soft-RAID array and apply its own RAID engine. This would allow you to copy all the data to new/other HDDs which you can access in Windows again. This operation is safe because it does not write a single byte to your existing disks with all the valuable data on it, so its a non-destructive procedure.

In either case, be very careful what you do. Its not that hard to screw things up and lose all your data in just one mouse click - especially on Windows when it prompts you to "initialize" the disks.

 

[Track]

You can do two things:

- buy a motherboard of the same chipset so you can migrate your existing RAID without any form of backup (dangerous)
- recover your RAID using read-only techniques and put it on new harddrives (safe)

The second option would work with any chipset, preferably those who do not support RAID, using any Linux or BSD system. For example, Ubuntu Linux would recognise your nVidia MediaShield soft-RAID array and apply its own RAID engine. This would allow you to copy all the data to new/other HDDs which you can access in Windows again. This operation is safe because it does not write a single byte to your existing disks with all the valuable data on it, so its a non-destructive procedure.

In either case, be very careful what you do. Its not that hard to screw things up and lose all your data in just one mouse click - especially on Windows when it prompts you to "initialize" the disks.

So you're saying I can install Linux and somehow the magical powers of Linux will get me my data back?

If so, let me just TRY to use a different board, as if it doesn't work, the procedure is completely reversible. Just tell me which to use.. then explain to me how Linux works, as I've never used it before. Also, what do you think of Raid 2 Raid?

 

[sub mesa]

Magical powers indeed!

RAID can be called a specification. The reason RAID arrays can't just be 'migrated' between different controllers is because each controller use its own configuration format, this configuration contains:
- stripe size
- disk order
- offset
- raid level

With these 4 basic settings, any RAID is accessible. That's exactly what Linux and BSD Software RAID does: it reads the "metadata format" so it knows the 4 basic settings your RAID is created with, and applies its own RAID engine. This works.

In fact, this RAID configuration is just 512 bytes of data - 1 sector that is located on each disk that is a member of a RAID array, and is located at the very end of each disk - the last sector. By reading that sector, it knows all it needs to know to access your RAID array.

So in fact all RAIDs are compatible as long as you can read the "format" of this metadata configuration sector. Linux knows all popular formats: Intel, nVidia, Promise, Silicon Image, JMicron, Adaptec and others.

To try this, simply:
1) download and burn Ubuntu 9.10
2) insert CD in drive and boot from the CD
3) Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and install the "mdadm" package - this is the software RAID configuration utility you need
4) open a terminal and execute:
sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

This should list information about your RAID array. If this works, it means Linux has already configured your RAID array and you can use it to read data from. The next step would be mounting and copying the data to another disk, preferably a single large disk that can hold all data currently on the RAID.

I would guide you to this process if you like. Try the 4 steps above and paste the output here and i'll give further instructions to help you recover your data.

Cheers.

 

[Track]

Magical powers indeed!

RAID can be called a specification. The reason RAID arrays can't just be 'migrated' between different controllers is because each controller use its own configuration format, this configuration contains:
- stripe size
- disk order
- offset
- raid level

With these 4 basic settings, any RAID is accessible. That's exactly what Linux and BSD Software RAID does: it reads the "metadata format" so it knows the 4 basic settings your RAID is created with, and applies its own RAID engine. This works.

In fact, this RAID configuration is just 512 bytes of data - 1 sector that is located on each disk that is a member of a RAID array, and is located at the very end of each disk - the last sector. By reading that sector, it knows all it needs to know to access your RAID array.

So in fact all RAIDs are compatible as long as you can read the "format" of this metadata configuration sector. Linux knows all popular formats: Intel, nVidia, Promise, Silicon Image, JMicron, Adaptec and others.

To try this, simply:
1) download and burn Ubuntu 9.10
2) insert CD in drive and boot from the CD
3) Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and install the "mdadm" package - this is the software RAID configuration utility you need
4) open a terminal and execute:
sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

This should list information about your RAID array. If this works, it means Linux has already configured your RAID array and you can use it to read data from. The next step would be mounting and copying the data to another disk, preferably a single large disk that can hold all data currently on the RAID.

I would guide you to this process if you like. Try the 4 steps above and paste the output here and i'll give further instructions to help you recover your data.

Cheers.

That would be nice, but unless Linux can run without a motherboard, I'm going to have to buy another. Now, if you can assure me that a P35 board will work just fine with the Linux method, that would be an option. But as it seems, wouldn't it be twice as safe to try this on an nVidia chipset? In which case, which ONE?

 

[sub mesa]

Any motherboard with plain SATA ports with RAID mode disabled can use the procedure i posted above. Be sure to disable RAID support in the BIOS; you will be using Software RAID instead. Do not boot windows while having the drives connected and RAID support disabled. At least not until you have your data safely backupped on a separate disk.

 

[Track]

Any motherboard with plain SATA ports with RAID mode disabled can use the procedure i posted above. Be sure to disable RAID support in the BIOS; you will be using Software RAID instead. Do not boot windows while having the drives connected and RAID support disabled. At least not until you have your data safely backupped on a separate disk.

Okay, okay. But that's the back-up plan. I want to try an nVidia chipset first.
I see that 610i/630i do support Wolfdale, but I doubt they overclock well.

 

[sub mesa]

Good luck, but as i said this is the dangerous route. If you do something wrong, you might lose all data.

 

[Track]

Good luck, but as i said this is the dangerous route. If you do something wrong, you might lose all data.

I found a cheap 630i board. Going out to buy it. Will post results.

 

[jitpublisher]

If you get it up and running, might I suggest you save all your data to a single external drive somewhere? Then you don't have to worry about this next time.
If you want to run RAID 0, you MUST have a good backup in place.

 

[Track]

If you get it up and running, might I suggest you save all your data to a single external drive somewhere? Then you don't have to worry about this next time.
If you want to run RAID 0, you MUST have a good backup in place.

That's the plan. I bought a 1.5TB external drive. I will transfer the files onto that and then move the RAID-0 array to my new motherboard, one by one and two in all. Then, I'll only be upgrading to X58 (from P45), so I won't have to worry about losing my data again. Besides, by then there will be 4TB-5TB drives and 2TB drives will be cheap.

 

[tomaso1z]

How did you get on?

After a google search i cant belive im in the same position, Im running XFX 680i LT with a Raid0 and put my motherboard down to fault not touched it for a few weeks i would like to try enabling the raid0 drives in a XFX 750i SLI mobo and hopefully the new board will see the raid array.

 

[javve]

Thanks for this. I'm having a similar problem only mine is not motherboard related. I have an Iomega external hard drive and the power supply is only putting out 11.24 volts now from the power supply itself. No voltage drop on the circuit board inside that powers the drives. They Tick when I turn the external drive on.

It just happened out of nowhere. I shut the computer down and the drive for a couple hours.... then just decided it didn't have the power to spin up the drives. I take the drives out and put them in my computer just to power up but not hook up, and they spin up fine. Computer power supply is putting out a little over 12 volts.

The Iomega external uses two seagate 500 gig hard drives ran in a raid-0 array so computer sees one external 1 TB drive. Unless I can repair the power adapter it'll be about $40 for a new one.

I've installed linux before, but am not sure if the package you mention is also available with other distro's. Time for a little research.

Magical powers indeed!

RAID can be called a specification. The reason RAID arrays can't just be 'migrated' between different controllers is because each controller use its own configuration format, this configuration contains:
- stripe size
- disk order
- offset
- raid level

With these 4 basic settings, any RAID is accessible. That's exactly what Linux and BSD Software RAID does: it reads the "metadata format" so it knows the 4 basic settings your RAID is created with, and applies its own RAID engine. This works.

In fact, this RAID configuration is just 512 bytes of data - 1 sector that is located on each disk that is a member of a RAID array, and is located at the very end of each disk - the last sector. By reading that sector, it knows all it needs to know to access your RAID array.

So in fact all RAIDs are compatible as long as you can read the "format" of this metadata configuration sector. Linux knows all popular formats: Intel, nVidia, Promise, Silicon Image, JMicron, Adaptec and others.

To try this, simply:
1) download and burn Ubuntu 9.10
2) insert CD in drive and boot from the CD
3) Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and install the "mdadm" package - this is the software RAID configuration utility you need
4) open a terminal and execute:
sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

This should list information about your RAID array. If this works, it means Linux has already configured your RAID array and you can use it to read data from. The next step would be mounting and copying the data to another disk, preferably a single large disk that can hold all data currently on the RAID.

I would guide you to this process if you like. Try the 4 steps above and paste the output here and i'll give further instructions to help you recover your data.

Cheers.

 

[Ziek22]

that is funny tomaso1z, my evga 680i lt board died a couple weeks ago and so i bought an asus 780i (being a complete idiot and not knowing that raid 0 are read different on each chipset), i got it running today and the raid gets up to the screen where i can choose either my xp or vista partition, when i run xp it loads up then blue screens, when i try vista it just continually loads never getting to the desktop. I haven't tried adding 780i drivers mostly because I cant get on to windows and I'm not sure how you would do it through the boot.

I've heard a few people be able to get away with going to a 680i to 780i with there raid 0 intact though they never explain how.

unless I find some new info I think I'm just going to play it safe from here, buy another hard drive and put all my info on that using sub mesas method hoping that i didn't already destroy something.

 

[MattP725]

I just wanted to add that the person that said you just enable raid in bios and the board will recognize the array is INCORRECT unless like they said you are using the exact same chipset. I just went through this 2 days ago. I knew that would be the case though so I backed up what I needed and formatted my drives when I resetup the array.

I guess that is one of the several pitfalls of raid is the inability to transfer it to any old controller like you would with a standard single sata drive. Especially when most people end up upgrading their board when it fails years down the line.

 

[h2gt2g]

Magical powers indeed!

RAID can be called a specification. The reason RAID arrays can't just be 'migrated' between different controllers is because each controller use its own configuration format, this configuration contains:
- stripe size
- disk order
- offset
- raid level

With these 4 basic settings, any RAID is accessible. That's exactly what Linux and BSD Software RAID does: it reads the "metadata format" so it knows the 4 basic settings your RAID is created with, and applies its own RAID engine. This works.

In fact, this RAID configuration is just 512 bytes of data - 1 sector that is located on each disk that is a member of a RAID array, and is located at the very end of each disk - the last sector. By reading that sector, it knows all it needs to know to access your RAID array.

So in fact all RAIDs are compatible as long as you can read the "format" of this metadata configuration sector. Linux knows all popular formats: Intel, nVidia, Promise, Silicon Image, JMicron, Adaptec and others.

To try this, simply:
1) download and burn Ubuntu 9.10
2) insert CD in drive and boot from the CD
3) Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and install the "mdadm" package - this is the software RAID configuration utility you need
4) open a terminal and execute:
sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0

This should list information about your RAID array. If this works, it means Linux has already configured your RAID array and you can use it to read data from. The next step would be mounting and copying the data to another disk, preferably a single large disk that can hold all data currently on the RAID.

I would guide you to this process if you like. Try the 4 steps above and paste the output here and i'll give further instructions to help you recover your data.

Cheers.

Hi sub mesa,

This thread might be long dead but if you read this then I came across the thread as I have the similar problem to that described in it - dead motherboard with a RAID 0 setup. I would like to try the Ubunto route to recovering the data and would welcome the further instructions you offered to provide the OP above.

Graham.

 

[h2gt2g]

As I got no reply from the above and after a few more hours research this is what i did to recover my data:

1. Download the Ubuntu 9.10 iso and burn it to a CD.

2. Connect the two discs to the two spare SATA ports in another machine I have which does not have a RAID controller on board - apparently a very good thing otherwise you must disable any RAID controller.

3. Boot the machine from the Ubuntu disk.

4. The disks were immediately recognised by the BIOS as two seperate 250MB disks (as you would expect) with auto detection being selected.

5. Ubuntu displayed the two disks as a single 500MB disk which I could then access and as Ubuntu also displayed the HDD in the machine I was able to simply copy the data I wanted across.

The reason this works, apparently, is that Ubuntu can read the RAID metadata in the last sector on each disk and has decoders for all the major RAID controller manufacturers metadata formats. Armed with this information it detects that the disks were part of a RAID array and then sets up a software RAID controller and thereby makes the disks available as a software RAID array to match their previous incarnation. Magic!!!!!!

I did not have to do anything with mdadm or mount the array Ubuntu just came up with it already mounted and useable straight off the boot!

 

[sub mesa]

Sorry for my lack of response, i don't monitor these forums that regularly anymore. Please write to me directly if you need help with something like this. My address is sub.mesa (at) the webmail provider from google (gmail).
It seems that, in your case, the 'md' or "Multiple Disk" driver was already active. You use 'mdadm' to 'interact' with the md driver; but they are two separate things.

If you would open a terminal and type "dmesg" it would show you all output of the boot process; including detecting the meta-data from your disks. You can search through it by using grep, like:

dmesg | grep sda

would show all lines containing "sda" like /dev/sda; if this is one of the harddrives of your RAID it should give some messages regarding this. Also try to grep md for any output the md driver gives. Just to confirm or learn from it; apparently you needed no additional configuration.

So to clarify: you do NOT need a RAID-capable chipset/motherboard to use Ubuntu to get data off your drives. If you do have a RAID-capable chipset/motherboard, disable it. Ubuntu should see the drives as 2 normally connected drives and will use its own software RAID driver -- md.

Hope other people can use this method to recover their FakeRAID/Chipset RAID array. Note that these are all software -- the chipset itself does not do anything crucial other than making booting from RAID array possible -- the windows drivers just do all the work and the hardware just operates as "SATA controller". The same thing can ofcourse be done on Linux; and if you teach that driver to read different formats of metadata - intel, nvidia, ati, jmicron, silicon image, promise, etc. - then you can support them all.

 

[h2gt2g]

Sorry for my lack of response, i don't monitor these forums that regularly anymore. Please write to me directly if you need help with something like this. My address is sub.mesa (at) the webmail provider from google (gmail).

[SNIP]

I tried the direct e-mail route suggested above but no reply. I sent it to your name including the dot as above @gmail.com

 

[sub mesa]

Oops - i missed it. Look again you may have a reply. ;-)

 

[aamann]

I was able to use this method recently to fix an issue described here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/256465-14-interpreting-raid-error-intel-matrix-storage#t1797763

Once I had the data backed up I went ahead and put in one of the new hard drives Dell had shipped to me. The Intel software would not recognize it and the computer would not boot. I switched the drive and the same thing happened. I assumed I would have to rebuild from scratch. Since I figured hope was lost, I went ahead and chose to set drive 0 (the "offline member") to "non-RAID" in the Intel screen.

That switched the overall RAID status from "failed" to "degraded" and it promptly re-built on the existing drives. Back to normal! I've sinced replaced the offline drive and had a successful rebuild as well.

Thanks, sub-mesa, for the help!