On this website we have previously discussed how to configure hard disk RAID both at the software and hardware level, and be it one way or another, there are certain configurations that must be made on the motherboard to work so, what would happen If your motherboard breaks down and you have to change it, or if you simply want to upgrade your PC to a new platform but want to keep the RAID configuration of your storage?
Like it or not, there are times when we are forced to change a hardware component because it fails, or simply because it is time to upgrade to a new platform. In any case, if you have a disk RAID configured, you will surely wonder what would happen if you want or have to change the motherboard of your computer, will the RAID configuration be lost?
Change the motherboard having a RAID, what happens to the data?
The information and the configuration of the configured RAID, be it software or hardware, is stored on the same hard drives, so the answer is that the data remains undamaged in them as long as you take some precautions that we will tell you about in brief.
Therefore, the data that you have stored on your hard drives configured in RAID will not be lost, and this means that you can migrate your RAID drives from one PC to another, as long as you meet a series of conditions.
For hardware configured RAID
You must take into account certain conditions to be able to migrate a RAID of disks from one motherboard to another. For starters, check that your motherboard supports RAID at the level you had it configured (almost all desktop motherboards support RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 at least, but you should always check). In addition, it is recommended that you turn on without the disk RAID physically connected the PC with the new motherboard and perform certain checks:
- The boot mode should be the same (that is, if you had it in UEFI, don’t change to EFI for example).
- RAID mode is enabled in BIOS. This is important because in the SATA configuration of a new motherboard, these are usually configured by default in AHCI mode, so you will have to enter the BIOS and change these parameters to RAID mode manually before connecting the hard drives to the system.
Even if you have an old motherboard and you have bought a new one, normally there is usually no incompatibility between chipsets in terms of RAID controllers, so normally after doing this you will be able to turn off the PC, physically connect the disks, boot it and when you do so you will see that it will appear kind of a wizard saying that a RAID volume has been detected. There is a good chance that when you do this the system will tell you to rebuild the RAID, a process that usually takes a long time and that obviously depends on the size of the volume, but there are occasions (especially if you have changed the motherboard for one of the same mark since it could use the same controller) that boots without further ado, as if nothing had happened.
For software configured RAID
In the case of RAID systems configured by software, you must perform the same checks as by hardware but there is an additional requirement, and that is that as we have said the RAID information is stored on the disks themselves, so it is necessary that the RAID be on the boot disks. In this case, after connecting them to the new motherboard and if there has been no problem, the system should boot as if you had not changed anything, although obviously when changing the motherboard you will probably have to reinstall many drivers.
In the event that the boot disk is not part of the RAID (and that you have it as additional storage), then it is very likely that if you do not connect all the disks from the beginning the system will refuse to boot and you will receive a blue screen saying missing Windows files to boot. Therefore, you must connect all the disks and perform all the previous steps that we have indicated before, the system should also boot without problems, although as before it is likely that having changed the motherboard you will also receive driver errors that you will have to reinstall.