[k0rr626]

I have a very simple problem:

I have three hard drives. 1 x 500GB which serves as my main/active HD, and 2 x 1.5TB HDs in a raid 1 array. After running into some overclocking issues I decided to reset the BIOS settings, which in turn disabled my RAID array. I did not notice for a few days until I noticed I had a D: and an E: drive, instead of just a D: drive. Meanwhile I had been writing additonal data to D:.

Can someone please post the safest way to rebuild my raid array? I have sensitive data in my 1.5TB HD and I have no space to back it up elsewhere, so I am asking for a safe-proof way to rebuild D: and E: again into a mirrored (raid 1) array without losing anything I have on D:. In other words I want to clone D: onto E: and resync them again.

What is the best course of action? Thanks in advanced.

[Troy]

As far as I know you'll have to start fresh to build the RAID array from scratch, and then copy your data back over. You'll need to grab a backup hard drive or something to achieve this.

And don't forget, (as you are experiencing) RAID 1 is very good, but shouldn't be relied upon to take the place of backups. You have sensitive data, so you need to make sure you have "offsite" backups of this data as well.

Cheers

[Kemasa]

As long as you have not written to D:, then all your data is there. Since there has been updates to D:, the safest things to do is to recreate the RAID array and just wipe out E:, since it is out of sync. You should be able to just set the BIOS settings, but you might want to wipe out the E: first, just to make sure that it does not copy the data from there.

[k0rr626]

Should I format E: as an NTFS partition (to match D:) or should I just leave it as an empty simple volume? Is it possible to use the RAID controller (780i motherboard has it built-in) to rebuild the raid array by writing everything from D: onto E: and then syncing them together into D: again?

Sorry this is my first time having to rebuild a raid array so I'm rather unfamiliar with the process and I can't seem to find much help on eVGA/nVIDIA forums. The manual is of no help either.

[Kemasa]

I would just delete the partition and not create it or create a filesystem on it.

The onboard RAID controller should have the ability to rebuild the RAID array as that is part of what it has to do. The process is to just re-sync the data or write all the data (if it does not see that it was part of the array before).