Switching RAID from Silicon Image to Intel on a D975XBX

[kibosh]

Hi All,

I have an Intel D975XBX motherboard which has 4 SATA ports that are on an Intel controller and 4 SATA ports that are Silicon Image. For some reason when my computer was built they connected my drives to the Silicon Image ports in a RAID0 configuration using a softraid instead of the intel hardware option. I would like to switch the drives to the Intel controller (the data transfer rate of the intel is 3 GB/s vs the silicon image which is 1.5 GB/s).

Can I do this without re-installing the OS?

Can I take a backup of my drive now, make the switch, setup the RAID0 partions (which wipes the drives), and then recover the backup?

Any advise is appreciated!

Thanks,

Kibosh

 

[Cinders]

You can do all of that with Norton Ghost. The only real problems I forsee are:

What are you going to store the backup image on? You can't store the image on a partition you're going to delete and then recover the image and you can't store the image on the same partition you're backingup.

You'll need to install the Intel RAID driver in your OS before you create the backup or when you do change disk controller cards and use the backup image to reinstall everything your computer will not boot.

 

[kibosh]

I use Paragon backup and have the data on DVD-RWs (the product is pretty sweet, it creates a bootable DVD and recovers very nicely). I have the Intel Maxtrix drivers installed already, so perhaps I am good to go?

 

[Cinders]

Sounds good. If it doesn't work you can always go back to the Silicon Image controller until you work out all the kinks.

 

[kibosh]

That is true . . . it just takes a few hours to recover and that would just suck if I had to do that twice!

Thanks for the help.

 

[kibosh]

Hi All,

Just to let anyone out there know that is interested . . . this did NOT work. Doing this produced some very interesting results though . . .

Once recovered, the drives on the Intel controller were seen by the BIOS as installed and bootable. I had to install a floppy drive so that I could load the F6 RAID drivers with the XP recovery console (BTW, I HAD to install a floppy, emulating a USB device as a floppy did NOT work with XP and it is apparently not supported by Microsoft). I went into the console so that I could disable any silicon image drivers that may have been trying to start at boot. I would pop out the floppy and reboot and get nothing. I went back and forth between trying to reboot and the recovery console several times and suddenly it worked! I was very happy! So I shut down, removed the floppy drive from the system, started it up again and nothing. So I reinstalled the floppy drive, started, and nothing . . . I happened to put the floppy disk with the RAID drivers into the drive and restart and voila!! Success! Everytime I wanted to start Windows i HAD to have the RAID drivers on a floppy disk in the drive to boot?!?!?!? I tried this several times and it was true! I have never seen anything quite like this.

I was talking to another buddy of mine and he mentioned that he thought that when you install an OS, the RAID drivers actually get compiled into the kernel and that might explain why this was occuring.

Anyway, I thought I would share this with anyone out there thinking about doing this . . . you better just re-install the OS from scratch!

Thanks,

Kibosh