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PsiFire

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Recombining split RAID drives
« on: November 17, 2009, 01:40:47 PM »
Recently I recovered from a BSOD (dust build up near the memory chips) and in the process I must have split my RAID drives because I now have an H: drive that I did not have before and it has an older mirror of my C: on it.

Here is the magic question. I would like to recombine the two RAID drives into one. Can I safely go into the BIOS and tell it to set the RAID back up and have it recombine the drives without a problem? Or will it wipe both drives and start from scratch. 232gig each so I'd rally rather not loose the main drive and all it's contents for obvious reasons. The H: I could obviously care less about since it's just an older mirror of C:

Please no conjecture. Facts only. If you've done it before with success, great. If not, don't guess.
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GenTsoChiken

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2009, 05:49:33 PM »
if you have the space and software (ghost), id say clone or back up the important drive and take a swing at it.
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PsiFire

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2009, 05:21:02 PM »
I'm backing up the important data to my Media drive and will give it a shot.
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PsiFire

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2009, 07:50:10 PM »
So the reason for the split in the RAID was because I reverted the BIOS to Optimized defaults due to a BSOD. The solution was as follows.

I moved all my important shit to a non-RAID drive and removed it from the system to avvoid any "accidents".

I started by reactivating the RAID in BIOS and setting only the two involved drives to be part of the RAID.
I tried booting the system as is but it locked hard and wouldn't proceed. I then tried a rebuild on the RAID and for some reason that didn't work either. I deactivated the RAID and booted into windows without incident. I did a quick format on the H: (which was basically an old copy of the boot drive) and restarted the system and then reactivated the RAID and then set it to rebuild. The system booted up and proceeded to remirror the first drive to the second over the course of the next few hours (I went to bed so don't know the exact time it took).

All is now well. Not sure why the rebuild wouldn't work before wiping out the second drive, guess it doesn't like pre-existing data. You can do a delete of the drive from the RAID utility of the BIOS, but didn't want to risk wiping the wrong drive.
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GenTsoChiken

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #4 on: December 01, 2009, 05:43:35 AM »
well, all is good! good to hear it all worked out for you!
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PsiFire

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #5 on: December 05, 2009, 05:55:09 PM »
Yeah, now I'm trying to get Win7 installed. So far the DVD for the x64 version won't get past the "Setup Loading" page......
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GenTsoChiken

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #6 on: December 06, 2009, 05:24:58 PM »
that sucks.....
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PsiFire

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2009, 02:31:26 AM »
Finally got the install to work. Had to boot the initial setup with safe mode (F8 @ load). So far it's been a positive experience.
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Popsikle

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2009, 11:15:14 AM »
windows 7 split my raid array when I installed on my 939 mobo.  I had to go back to XP and couldn't rebuild the array.  I was lucky because it was a radi 10 array across 4 drives and I pulled two drives out before I tried the upgrade so I at least had working data ;)  I build a temp machine with those two drives and moved all my data off lol.
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PsiFire

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Re: Recombining split RAID drives
« Reply #9 on: December 09, 2009, 11:35:44 PM »
Yeah. I made sure before I upgraded to Win7 that I pulled one of the two drives in my RAID mirror so that if something went horribly wrong, I could go back to XP by just swapping in the other drive. LOVE my RAID.
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