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I built a new PC this weekend, and one of the joys I had was to transfer my RAID 1 array to the new system with a different mobo. The disks were not recognized at all, by either the mobo (no surprise) or Windows XP.
Now with the disks running on the new system, out of curiosity I switched the BIOS from "RAID" to "AHCI" and booted into Windows. Much to my surprise, Computer Management showed the two HDDs as separate drives partitioned into 279 GB and 84 MB, and both as being healthy NTFS formatted disks. Neither were assigned a letter or mounted, and I didn't mount them because I didn't want to screw anything up.
So my question is... is it possible that RAID 1 support on my new motherboard is formatting the primary partition on each HDD in a stock standard way, and storing any RAID specific data in the separate small partition? Can anyone say with any certainty?
Mobo hardware is an MSI 790GX-G65, which is an AMD SB750 RAID chipset.
PS: This matters to me because I was planning on upgrading to Windows 7 and switching to software RAID to avoid problems with loosing my data if my mobo fails and my backups are not completely up to date.
1I think, I will rebuild my old system with a spare HDD I have lying around, and once I have it up, pull one of the RAID drives and see what it looks like in the old system. – Lawrence Dol – 2010-01-19T09:44:58.767