Motherboard Dead & Raid 0

**berryb** · 30-05-2007, 07:15 PM

I went to put in another 512mb ram and on reboot fried the motherboard. Ram must have been faulty It was secondhand but was working fine in the old PC.

Anyway PC had 4 hard drives. 2 IDE & 2 SATA. 2 SATA were Raid 0 with a backup image of the Raid 0 data stored on one of the IDE drives.

Old motherboard was Elite and new is Gigabyte. I assume the new will not find the Raid 0 of the old. Haven't tried it yet as parts not arrived yet.

After the best way forward. Don't really want to reinstall everything so hoping a boot from Acronis CD to find the backup and restore.

Never had to do a repair when Raid has been is use so what do ya reckon? If I can restore the drive then all I will need to do is update the chipset drivers and all fine until I have time to do a full format and start again.

**berryb** · 30-05-2007, 07:17 PM

Also meant to add I am updating cpu,ram and video card.

**The_End_Of_Reality** · 30-05-2007, 07:28 PM

RAM can not fry a motherboard that I have seen, you must have touched it in some way and damaged it (electrostatic)... Did you try taking out the CMOS battery and resetting the CMOS? this fixes a fair few problems like that... I have fixed 2 non POSTing PCs in the last month just by taking out the CMOS battery over night and resetting the CMOS.

I am not sure if it will pick up the RAID as I have never actually had to do that...

No... changing a major component such as a mobo, it is best to avoid any issues to reinstall Windows... I reinstall anytime I have made a major hardware change, saves all the driver issues and Windows issues

If the RAM was working fine in the old PC, then that was NOT the cause of the mobo failure.

**george12** · 30-05-2007, 07:45 PM

Just a repair install should be fine.

You are more likely to have had it not quite in and shorting some pins out than for bad RAM to have fried the motherboard.

I think the RAID should be fine, as long as the new board supports it. Just set up the array again in the RAID BIOS and it should start working.

Was there any smoke/sparks/bang when you turned it on?

**tweak'e** · 30-05-2007, 07:49 PM

Originally Posted by george12

I think the RAID should be fine, as long as the new board supports it. Just set up the array again in the RAID BIOS and it should start working.

not necessarily so. usually the raid has to be the same chipset and the exact same settings. most manafactures have different ways in implementing raid so most are different. some are different from chipset to chipset and even from bios to bios. promise is one of the few that can migrate between diffeent promise chipsets.

**berryb** · 30-05-2007, 07:52 PM

I will try taking out the cmos battery. Well I thought the ram was OK but maybe I stuffed up and threw out the wrong ram and kept the bad one. And it is possible it wasn't seated correctly. I didn't notice anything when I took it out and the end locks were seated. Hopefully george you are right and the array is detected.

Not overly worried about having to upgrade as it was in the to do plan but

**Pete O'Neil** · 31-05-2007, 08:39 AM

If you've got a backup of the data stored on a separate drive from the RAID array then there are no problems. You'll need to rebuild the RAID array, which will delete all data on previous array but this wont be a problem as its backed up. Once you've rebuilt the array on the new controller simply restore the data as you would a normal drive.

**berryb** · 31-05-2007, 07:22 PM

Thanks Pete. The image is on the ide drive so all should be good. I just wanted confirmation on the process and since posting yesterday have thought about it and decided to do it that way. Cheers for that.

**berryb** · 02-06-2007, 03:49 PM

Update FYI.

Old PC.
I removed the cmos battery and left for a day and also cleared bios via jumper and still no posting. Powers up but nothing!!

Upgraded and re-created the raid 1 and deleted the data. Put the image of all partitions that were on the array back on, rebooted and did a XP repair install, loaded the new raid drivers and away it went. A couple of errors came up along the way but it did startup into my login alright. The repair took it back to pre XP SP so all updates since then had to be redone.

At present looks as though all has worked without to many majors. Now rejoining to the domain so back to normal.

I intend to re format sometime in the future and I didn't really want to do so right now. This excercise has proved to me that as long as backups are in place away from the raid array then a full backup is possible.

Next step - Dual boot with Vista when I get a chance.