Windows 7 reformat - Will my software RAID be affected?

[foothead]

Hi everyone, first post here in quite a while. I've been considering upgrading my HTPC, and was wondering if I'm going to run into problems with my Hard drives. I have a 2TB Caviar green and a 1.5TB 7200.11 "spanned" in Windows 7 (It's the option that makes Windows present them as a single 3.5TB volume), and the actual OS is on a separate 160GB drive. Basically, I'm worried that when I reinstall Windows 7 on the 160GB drive, it won't be able to recognize the spanned volume and will force me to reformat. I've googled this quite a bit, but nobody seems to know.

 

[Indigo]

As long as you don't touch that spanned volume, windows should pick up on it due to identifiers that Windows puts on the boot record. I used software RAID 5 and had to install Windows on the host system drive and it found the RAID 5 setup without an issue.

 

[JCB1]

i agree with og as ive done this as well, but can you backup the data before you try this?? I guess not as that could be alot of data

 

[foothead]

As long as you don't touch that spanned volume, windows should pick up on it due to identifiers that Windows puts on the boot record. I used software RAID 5 and had to install Windows on the host system drive and it found the RAID 5 setup without an issue.

Excellent. Thanks for you help.

i agree with og as ive done this as well, but can you backup the data before you try this?? I guess not as that could be alot of data

Can't back it up. There's around 2.75 TB worth of stuff on that drive.