Nvidia fake raid recovery

blibak

Honorable
Dec 5, 2012
3
0
10,510
Hello,
My nforce 680i SLI based motherboard died. I've been using the onboard fake raid to create a stripe set of two disks. Now I need to replace the mb. Do I have to choose a mb with a nvidia chipset (nforce/geforce) in order to recover the data on the raid? Or is there other solutions, e.g. software or expansion cards?
 
Solution
In theory all later models based on nvidia chipset (nforce/geforce) should have backwards compatible raid controller. However, I would try to buy the same chipset based motherboard, and preferably the exact same brand and model as the one that died.

All other raid controllers (doesn't matter integrated or not) are incompatible.

As for the software method, there is something you could try (found on other forums):
Connect the drives to your mobo, but DO NOT enable RAID in the BIOS. Leave it set to AHCI. Boot up a Linux Live CD with dmraid support, such as the Fedora Live CD. (The Ubuntu Live CD does NOT have dmraid support, so it won't work!) If all goes well it will read the nvidia metadata off the drives, pretend the array exists...

Bejusek

Distinguished
In theory all later models based on nvidia chipset (nforce/geforce) should have backwards compatible raid controller. However, I would try to buy the same chipset based motherboard, and preferably the exact same brand and model as the one that died.

All other raid controllers (doesn't matter integrated or not) are incompatible.

As for the software method, there is something you could try (found on other forums):
Connect the drives to your mobo, but DO NOT enable RAID in the BIOS. Leave it set to AHCI. Boot up a Linux Live CD with dmraid support, such as the Fedora Live CD. (The Ubuntu Live CD does NOT have dmraid support, so it won't work!) If all goes well it will read the nvidia metadata off the drives, pretend the array exists, and let you copy all your files to another (e.g. external) drive. You can then re-create the original array and then copy your files back. This works because Linux uses the metadata written to the drives, rather than the BIOS, to determine if you have a fakeraid array.
 
Solution

blibak

Honorable
Dec 5, 2012
3
0
10,510


Thanks Bejusek, I was not aware that dmraid worke like this. The machine has in fact been run with Linux and dmraid, so I guess this is a probable soution. I will investigate this further.