I have a Gigabyte 880GA-UD3H motherboard with an AMD Athlon II X4 3GHz CPU, assembled in 2010. My system drive is a single Seagate 1TB hard drive on GSATA2 port 6, which is partially failed (I/O errors, could only get it to boot safe mode, but I was able to SLOWLY copy some info off of it). So that needs to be replaced and have Win7 re-installed.
Also in the system are 2 2TB drives set up as RAID 1 on SATA3 ports 0 & 1, and 2 3TB drives set up as RAID 1 on SATA3 ports 2 & 3. The two true RAIDs contain all our precious personal media (photos, videos, documents, music, etc.).
So here's the question(s): Since one should only plug in the drive intended to be C: when installing Windows (to avoid it being installed on the wrong physical drive), I assume I should temporarily unplug the RAID drives until Windows 7 is installed again. If I do that, will the RAID settings in the BIOS be maintained, such that I could simply plug the RAID drives up again without having to re-create them and, heaven forbid, lose any of their data? I just want to make sure that when I connect the RAID drives again, I can tell the system "these2 are a RAID, and these 2 are a RAID, please don't format or delete them." Can I safely disconnect the RAID drives and proceed with a re-install of Windows on a fresh c: drive?
Any advice will be GREATLY appreciated! It's stressful to worry about so much precious RAID data. :-)
