transferring a raid1 array to another board

[jarthel]

for example:

my raid1 setup is currently using an nforce4 board. If I move it to a newish intel (975 and above) board, would the data disappear? how about transferring to a newer nforce chipset?

also any thoughts of moving from intel to nforce?

In all cases, the motherboard will be configured to recreate the raid1 array again after transferring the HDDs. Also I have a single HDD that contains the OS.

thank you

[stevecs]

The array won't be transportable. Create a backup of your data and restore it on the new system when you re-create the array on the new chipset. I normally use acronis for this but any good backup tool will work.

[jarthel]

are you saying that once I reconfigure the motherboard for my raid1, the data in the drives will be lost?

[stevecs]

Yes, you cannot transport a hardware assisted raid between vendors, (you should even be careful with the same vendor). RAID is not designed to aid with any data migration efforts at all. Back up your data on the array to something else. recreate the array on the new motherboard and then restore your data.

[Speederlander]

Only acceptable way is to rebuild the RAID 1 from scratch on new board and transport data to it after. Never just move an array and hope all goes well.

[jarthel]

BUT if I move just the drives to the new board and not setup the array, I suppose my data will be there?

[stevecs]

Your data would be physically on the drive but it probably will not be accessible. RAID adds an abstraction layer around the physical drives. Depending on coding this generally offsets the start of the vtoc that the OS will see from the first sector of the drive so it will generally appear to be unformatted. With RAID-1 you have a higher chance to get data back from it in a recovery situation but it's still a chance. Since you have them on a working system already the best method is to back up, re-create and restore. Anything else you're just playing Russian roulette.

[szukalski]

This is why using partition based RAID in linux (mdadm) is so great, you can migrate the drives to any other mdadm capable linux system easily. I just upgraded my server with a fresh OS install of ubuntu and the drive migration was seamless. Perhaps not so useful if you're in a Windows environment (for gaming or benchmarking I guess) but for data storage, partition based OS-level RAID is greatly versatile (mdadm RAID comprising an lvm is hugely powerful and flexible).