Hi all,
My home PC required a motherboard replacement, but I've got 4 x 2TB HDDs in a hardware RAID 5 which is almost full of data. After some research I read that if I replace my motherboard with the same model and plug the drives into the ports in the exact same order then the RAID 5 should recover normally.
So I purchased the exact same motherboard, labelled all the cables per SATA ports and performed the somewhat exhausting task of swapping out the old motherboard for the new.
Turning the power on, I can set the BIOS for SATA ports to be in RAID, but when I go into the RAID setup on boot, although it recognises that there IS an existing RAID 5, it declares that 2 of the drives aren't in the RAID so it's labelled as "FAILED".
Since I don't have a decent backup of the data I'm slightly freaking out. (Please don't start me about lack of backups - got some stuff backed up but not all).
Swapping the old motherboard back in is possible, but not ideal as I'm out of alcohol wipes for the thermal paste and it's 11pm so I can't go get any.
Question is - what can I do? Do I recreate the RAID but not initialise it? will that make things worse? Any help would be REALLY appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Glen