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Asus P5DL2 Motherboard using RAID-5 w/ 3 hard drives. The motherboard has died, but the drives are fine. The user was not making backups of their data (how many times do I have to tell people, "RAID is not a backup???")

How can I reconnect the RAID array without losing the data?

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3 Answers 3

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Because it is a RAID setup, you're only option is to find the EXACT motherboard in order to be able to recover the drives.

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Yes, but will it magically come back when I plug the hard drives into the new board? What steps should I take? –  James Watt Oct 14 '10 at 15:18
I can't guarantee that this will solve the problem, but it seems to be the best solution. This solution works for RAID cards, so I don't see why it won't work in this situation. Depending on the operating system, make sure you boot up in safe mode once you have the new board installed, just to make sure no strange drivers foobar the system so that it doesn't work ever again. –  brandon927 Oct 14 '10 at 15:25

James, if you relied on the motherboard to provide RAID, then I second what brandon927 said (that is, you are already using the 'fake raid'). However, if you configured your RAID using an operating system function (for example a LINUX mdadm) you can run any fresh motherboard and your new 'mdadm' assembled RAID should come up just fine. If you need advice how to restart mdadm, let me know. As a follow-up question, does any Windows operating system provide anything similar to software RAID used in LINUX?

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You can use RAID Reconstructor to take a stab at recovering the data without the hardware RAID running.

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Nice tip. Gives me more clarity when I back-up my RAID configs. Incidentally, I just had a 2.5 year old mobo die. Funny thing is, a 10 year old mobo right next to it was still going strong. –  Rolnik Nov 7 '10 at 19:20

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