got an odd question

[stlouis1]

so one of the guys at work asked me this the other day, since im the hardware guy here in the office. 80 friggin techs here and im the one they ask about hardware issues like i ave nothing better to do.

but anyway, i just rembered this and figured id post because it caught my attention, and i know avid6eek here works around alot of servers and thought to myself he might be able to help;)

question was
he has two 80gb SATA drives striped on his machine right now. he's planning on upgrading and asked me about moving those two drives onto the new controller on the new mobo. he has seperate partitions on them so the os partition can be wiped to do a fresh install on the new system, thats not the issue. the issue is moving the drives to the new controller, can it be done??? i think it would be possible if it were a RAID 5 or something, but im really not sure

my only suggestion was to throw in a 160gb hard drive, i had one i could lend him. ghost the raid partitions onto it. rebuild the raid on the other controller and ghost everything back. but as far as changing the controller i have no idea

[therealwesty]

I successfully managed something like that once. I had a pair of Raptors in RAID-0 and a 200GB SATA drive. the Raps were on the nVidia SATA controller and the 200GB on the SI SATA controller. I sold one of the Raps.

I cloned the contents of the RAID array to the 200GB, resized the resulting partition and then cloned the OS back to a single 36GB. I used Partition Magic 8 and it all worked great. Just make sure to install the SATA controller driver for all the SATA contollers needed for the operation before you start anything. No garuntees of course, but good luck.

[stlouis1]

ya, but we're trying to move the raid to a new controller. ghosting it to another drive, building a new raid and moving the data over is kind of a last resort as its a lengthy process

[Zefram]

Hmm........... will the RAID info still be there if you move from one RAID controller to a new ones?
Or perhaps the controller will prompt you to rebuild the RAID array?
Question Question Question :D

[stlouis1]

ya, but he has no direct way of backing it up, unless i lend him a drive which i cant do right now, i have stuff i still need on that drive, and no fat32 drive to throw and image of it on right now. so yeah, we need to move the raid to a new controller. just not sure if it will prompt to rebuild the raid or will it even recognize there was a raid to rebuild, being as its a different controller, like i said, an odd question

[Slumpy]

If its the same raid conntroller he should be able to swap it without any problems is its a diff controller theres a 50% chance its wont reconize it and you'll have to re build it

[stlouis1]

50% chance is good enough....i guess ima have to do some overclocking soon (some how) get some BM's and i can clear that 160gb i got so he can do a backup just incase