Mobo died, need to recover data from RAID drives

I have a RAID dillema and could use some help.

I had my Abit IC7 board die and I was running 2 SATA drives in RAID 0 off the onboard Intel ICH5R. I don't know if I will be getting the same motherboard, but chances are I will have another Intel board with an ICH5R southbridge.

My problem is that I don't know how to get my files off of those 2 drives. I'm not really concerned about recovering Windows just my files.

Does it matter if I get another IC7 board or does it only matter if it has the same southbridge? Also, if I get another IC7 will by original RAID setup work on that motherboard?

Thanks!

If you want that data, the short answer and most assured route to it is to get yourself another IC7.

Buying another IC7 might not be an option. Is there any way to read the data on another SATA equipped mobo?

Why would another ICH5R equipped mobo not read the drives? Is it a bios/raid driver issue?

Your RAID information is stored on the drives, even moving to a different RAID card wouldn't cause you to loose data.

Yes, you should be able to do it. ICH5R array = ICH5R array. Do a search ICH5R array move IC7 + new intended MB. Its just that its close to a sure thing with the IC7. You mess up that array and you may be faced with a little or a lot of work getting your stuff back.

Th0r said:

Your RAID information is stored on the drives, even moving to a different RAID card wouldn't cause you to loose data.

Click to expand...

Not true. I'm on a Promise SATA controller right now, after having moved from the Intel ICH5R. Lost everything on the drives. This was a planned move because I'm comparing the speed of the Promise to the Intel, but even though the array info is contained on the drives, you can't move from one type to another. Although I've move an array from a Promise controller to a different Promise controller, and had that work, I've never been able to move an array from one kind of controller to another.

Ok, thanks to all for digging a little deeper into this mystery of mine. Again, the OC forums is like a 5 star support team!

I did do a search before I posted, as always, but I could not find anybody that posted a resolution to a problem that was similar to mine.

So, just to be certain, I stand a decent chance of getting my data with another Intel ICH5R board such as an IC7 MAX3 or an Asus P4C800 E?

I would say yes as long as the new mobo has the same controller.You will most likely need an IDE drive to install windows and backup the data so you can copy them back after rebuilding the array.It will be easier if you have the data on seperate partitions from the OS but with another boot drive you should be able to see the installation on the sata after installing the raid drivers within windows.

I recently got the idea that I wanted to change my setup by swapping drives on each array and changing the PCI slots so that the hardware card would boot the OS instead of having the programs and vice versa.Assuming I would lose all data,I backed up the data on both arrays to my IDE drive and did the swap.Upon reboot,I entered the first raid bios and didn't realize that I had to delete the array before I could rebuild a new one.Anyway I rebuilt and booted to fdisk and created a new partition for Windows and Ghosted my C: image to the partition.Thinking I could do the rest within Windows I let it boot and was surprised to see my programs partition still there,as well as the storage partition on that array.Even though the cards were completly different they must use the same chipset because it all the data was there on the array that i hadn't rebuilt.