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Hi everyone,

I am in a quandary, and any help would be massively appreciated.

I have a PC with two SATA ports on the mobo. I have been running a RAID 0 config on the SATA ports with built-in Nvidia RAID control, with my system drive on IDE, which has been great, but my system drive is old and tired and noisy and in need of replacement.

I have now got myself a PCI RAID controller which I want to move my RAID drives to, freeing up the SATA ports on the mobo for my system drive and DVD drive.

Tonight I have connected my new drive to the PCI controller, found it in Disk Management and backed up my RAID data to this drive, that will become my system drive after I have successfully transferred the data back to my new RAID array. And here lies my problem. I currently have no budget for external backing up (hence all these shenanigans), and need all of the data on my RAID array.

I am terrified of switching all the drives around. Even though I have my data backed up, I am worried about deleting my RAID array (which I assume I have to do to be able to plug the new system and DVD drives and have them recognised as 'normal' rather than RAID), and then not being able to access the backed-up data. I still have my IDE system drive connected until I can work out how to sort this out.

Can anyone suggest a way of moving the drives around the ports so that I can:

a) Move my existing RAID array (well, drives) to the new controller (I know data will have to be lost at this point, and this is what worries me)
b) Connect my drive with the backed-up data to the mobo SATA ports (easy in itself, but can I be sure that the the data still be there bearing in mind my RAID array will have been deleted at this point? Or how can I access the data afterwards? After I delete the RAID on the mobo, will the new drive be seen as easily as one would expect?)
c) Set up my new RAID array and transfer the data from the backup drive to the new RAID
d) Keep my hair!

I apologise for the slightly garbled nature of this post, but any help would be fantastic!

Cheers,

Jamie...