NVidia RAID - non-destructive WinXP reinstall?

warrensyswarrensys
edited June 2007 in Hardware
I have a customer who had a standard IDE drive as the boot drive, and had mirroring via his ASUS motherboard (NVidia RAID) enabled on 2 of his SATA drives. Windows went south on the IDE drive, which prompted us to do a fresh install. My question is, is there a way to get Windows to see the existing RAID mirrored pair without wiping out the data on them? I have not written anything to them, however when I boot windows, it acts like they don't exist. If I run the NVIDIA bios utility, it sees the drives, but only gives me the option of reinitializing them, which I don't want to do. So... I either need to figure out a way to get Windows to acknowledge the existing RAID pair, or somehow extract the data (I know, can't do that unless Windows can see the drives) and then re-create everything. Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Don Warren

P.S. We originally tried a Windows Repair, but it wouldn't complete the process, so I did a backup of it before doing the fresh install. I've heard that the NVidia RAID is kind of a hardware/software hybrid, i.e, it's not all done through hardware... I was thinking that if the backup contains any config files that will tell NVidia which drives are configured for RAID, I could possibly get those files from the backup & stick them in the appropriate directory on the new install. Yes, No, Maybe?... Thanks!

Comments

  • Your-Amish-DaddyYour-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas
    edited June 2007
    Make sure the raid is configured up properly, and install the latest drivers for the chipset and disk interfaces. My raid putts along format after format..
  • warrensyswarrensys
    edited June 2007
    If you read my post closely, I'm looking for a way to get this working again WITHOUT reformatting (which I should be able to do)... glad yours works, but unfortunately this doesn't answer my question. The drives are already RAID formatted and were working perfectly before Windows was reinstalled on the NON-RAID system drive.
  • Your-Amish-DaddyYour-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas
    edited June 2007
    And if you'll read through mine, I haven't formatted my raid, since I made it.

    EDIT://Okay that wasn't exactly clear in the post...But my raid hasn't been formatted since I made it roughly three months ago. You shouldn't have to re-initialize your raid if it's hardware.
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