Replacing motherboard with Intel RAID 1 (mirror)

Yesterday I needed to replace motherboard with active boot volume, that consisted of RAID 1 (mirror).

There were two possibilities of where Intel RAID controller (ICH10R) keeps RAID configurations:

  • in controller
  • in RAID HDDs
  • in both places

How things went:

  • Power off
  • Replace broken motherboard with new one
  • Power on
  • First boot slow (perhaps installing drivers)
  • Everything works without doing anything

So my guess is – configuration is kept inside hard disk drives (HDD), and perhaps in RAID controller too.

So if your RAID controller or motherboard has died, you can replace it without need to rebuild RAID volume.

Involved motherboards:

  • EVGA SLI LE
  • EVGA X58 CLASSIFIED 3

P.S. Windows 7 Ultimate didn’t asked to re-activate after replacement.