Moving ASUS A7V8X RAID(1) drive to another MB

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Laird
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G

Greg Laird

Hi,
I have an ASUS A7V8X MB configured in RAID(1) mode using the onboard
Promise controller chip and two SATA drives. Everything works fine.

I am having some problems with the ASUS board using a dual video
adapter configuration and I want to test my system on another MB (I was
thinking about the ABit N7).

Can I just unhook one SATA drive from my ASUS system and plug it into
the SATA connector on the new MB and expect the drive to boot? I would
want to use the drive simply as a SATA drive with no RAID.

I ask this question because I don't know what Promise does to the a
drive to make it a RAID(1).

Thanks for your help,
Greg Laird
 
it might boot..but chances are you will crash...you are changing all the M/B
drivers..one is a VIA chipset..the other Nvidia..so chances are you will
corrupt the XP installation and have to reformat..but that is just a chance
 
Do you have some experience with this? I was hoping that the promise
drive simply wrote the array configuration info on an unsued portion of
the SATA drive and if I hooked the SATA drive to an unraid controller,
it would just look like a plain SATA drive.

What do you think?
 
but Windows has loaded as a RAID array..I am running RAID 0..but you may get
away with it...when you look in your device manager windows will show an
array..not a single SATA drive..and if the controllers are different...ie
promise to SIL..then Windows may not see it. Try Googl'n it to see if there
are more facts. Am just going on basic principle here as a Computer
Diagnostic tech.
 
For the record, if anyone is interested, I did the following. I
purchased a ASUS A7N8X motherboard that provides the Sil 3112A SATA
RAID controller. I booted from an IDE drive and installed the Sil
3112A drivers into a Windows 200 Pro system. I installed one of my
RAID(1) SATA drives written by the Promise PDC20376 RAID controller
chip. The Sil 3112A controller was able to read the drive written by
my old RAID(1) configuration--it looked like an ordinary SATA drive.
So, in this instance, drives written in a RAID(1) format by Promise
were able to be read by Silicon Image.

I did try to boot from the newly mounted drive and the boot failed as
dino suspected--Win 2K on the RAID(1) system was using Promise drivers
and those drivers would not work with the Sil controller on the new
system.

So, in this instance, the OS was unusable but my data was still intact.
 
Raid companies use their own methods. If you are changing controller types
(or even models, for that matter) you are going to run into trouble.

-Larry
 
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