Can I disconnect raid drives to repair/replace os drive without losing raid data?

[Ksblinde]

On my pc I have 4 HDDs configured as a raid 5. I have a seperate SSD that has my OS on it. After an automatic Windows update the OS crashed and when it boots I get a load bootable content message. I've verified boot priority and the OS drive is first to boot (this has been tried as a manual boot as well). I still get the same message. I've tried repairing OS drive with original windows 7 disk and I get a different message saying "this version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair". Both are Windows 7 though. After some searching I found that this message can come up if multiple drives are connected to the motherboard and the way to fix it is to disconnect all drives but the OS drive. So if I disconnect all my raid drives from the motherboard will I lose all the data in the raid 5 array? Or if I keep raid array connected and just reinstalled Windows 7 on the OS drive, will I loose all the data on the raid? Any help will be much appreciated! Thanks!!

 

[JaredDM]

You should be fine to disconnect them. Any actual RAID controller will write metadata to the drives so it knows what configuration they were in. If you're just using the motherboard's built in RAID they can be a bit more finicky. I'd make sure to mark which SATA cable goes to which first. And if you don't have a backup of the RAID, I'd probably just use a Linux live USB or DVD to boot the system and backup the data. Remember, RAID isn't backup, so you should have one anyway.

 

[Ksblinde]

I do have a seperate backup of the raid (two in fact). So I marked the SATA cables and disconnected them (as well as the HDDs power) and tried the repair. The disk repair didn't work so I had to do a fresh install. But once the install was complete as well as all the updates, I shut everything down reconnected cables and the raid was recognized with all data intact. Now it's just reinstalling all the software I use and not a massive data transfer to rebuild the raid. Thanks for the help!!!!