Am I screwed?

[SubKamran]

So my SATA RAID BIOS dies... on my motherboard. I think it must have been damaged from a power surge and it just died today.

So my question is, it's a Intel ICH5 RAID chipset... my volumes are created, OS installed, it was working for a week. So if I buy an internal controller card, will my volumes still show up, or have I lost all of my data? (RAID 0, 2 x 200GB)

 

[SubKamran]

I got it to come back up, but I still have the same question... because I want to upgrade my motherboard and I don't think it will have a ICH5 chipset.

 

[furiousV]

If its socket 478 it will most likely be a ICH5 or ICH5R, I think the ICH6 is for socket 775

Just make sure you buy a motherboard with an Intel chipset if your not sure, though I thought it won't matter if its a different RAID controller

 

[SubKamran]

If its socket 478 it will most likely be a ICH5 or ICH5R, I think the ICH6 is for socket 775

Just make sure you buy a motherboard with an Intel chipset if your not sure, though I thought it won't matter if its a different RAID controller

Dang I don't want Intel, I want an Athlon 64 FX.

Does anyone know? ICH5 is a software RAID... whatever that means. I read that good controllers put the RAID information in the first 2048 bytes (or something) of the hard drives. And I read if you keep the configuration (i.e. Disk 1 on Bus 1, etc.) it should be okay...

But I still don't have a complete answer.

 

[furiousV]

ICH5 is a physical RAID controller, therefore its hardware RAID.

I think what software RAID is when you have a program running in Windows that takes two hard drives - obviously not the same drives Windows is on - and uses them as if they were in RAID. That is my guess.

Try it and see what happens ?

 

[Asus]

Yeah ICH5 is an Intel chipset that controls a lot of things including RAID. It isn't on boards that use Nvidia or VIA chipsets (for AMD or Intel CPUs) but on the Intel chipset. Without extra software (probably have to buy it) you are probably out of luck.

Even with my 300GB drive just from a reinstall it didn't see any of my data on it. It picked the drive up as 137GB and then I had to install the driver to let it be seen as a 300GB drive. Thats because it made a new partition. I could have recovered the data with recovery software if I wanted. I would think recovering a RAID array would be similar, requiring software to piece it back together by reading the 1s and 0s.