from RAID 0 to AHCI without data loss?

helaughsatfear
helaughsatfear Member Posts: 6 New User

Hi all. I have some questions.

 

In BIOS there is a SATA option between IDE, AHCI, and RAID. I have RAID right now.

If I select AHCI, will windows 8 still load?

Will the RECOVERY partition be accessible?

I have the RECOVERY partition (16Gb or so) backed up to another drive, will I be able to use it to reinstall Windows 8 to the non RAID configuration?

 

Any ideas or tips?

My BIOS version is 2.11

 

Answers

  • Ryanrr
    Ryanrr Member Posts: 831 Practitioner WiFi Icon

    I would recommend leaving your system in the configuration it came as it was optimized for your use. If you feel you want to change the setup, then no the system most likely will not boot if you change it from RAID to AHCI. However, if you have the recovery media you can configure the system how you want, then run the recovery media to reinstall the operating system.

     

    Without knowing your system it is hard to tell what kind of raid you are running. If your system as the small SSD, then I would definitely leave the configuration as is because this helps your system load faster from both a cold boot and resume state.

     

  • helaughsatfear
    helaughsatfear Member Posts: 6 New User

    Thanks for the reply =]

    Just a heads up to anyone who wants to create a system recovery and put it on a partition on an external drive, the windows recovery program will write the recovery to the entire external drive regardless which specific partition you point it to. Keep that in mind and backup your backup.


    I switched from RAID (raid0, striped) to AHCI.
    The system recovery disk that I created from within windows was unable to reinstall windows 8 after this modification. Actually none of the options seemed to work from that recovery disk.
    I'm happily running Linux Mint 17 on one 128GB SSD and openSUSE 13.1 on the other 128GB.
    Thanks for your time!

     

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