Changing RAID Hardware

I bought a nice new ASUS motherboard and a couple of new 500 gig hard drives. Using Microsoft's sysprep and Acronis True Image everything upgraded perfectly. I continued to use my existing add on RAID card that utilizes the Silicon Image chipset just to reduce the possibility of problems.

My new ASUS motherboard (running XP) has onboard nVidia RAID which is 3 gigs/sec vs. my add on RAID card 1.5 gigs/sec.

Has anyone got any good ideas as to how I can switch RAID controllers. I have a catch 22 situation where nVidia RAID drivers will not load unless you have RAID enabled in the BIOS. The RAID BIOS setup tells me that all hard drive data will be lost if I set up a RAID 1 pair. I really don't have the time to rebuild my system from scratch but I would like to take advantage of the faster nVidia RAID on the motherboard.
Any ideas would be appreciated.

If anything, you can make an image of your existing setup with TI, create the new mirror array, then restore your image to the array. After that, you will probably have to do a repair install and use F6 to add the nvidia RAID drivers.

Are your drives even SATAII and 3.0Gbps compliant? Specific make/model of your hardware would help.

My motherboard is an ASUS M2N68-Am plus.
http://motherboards-reviews.com/ASUS...fications.html

Currently I have 2 Western Digital 500 gig hard drives in RAID 1 mode.
Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7,200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM

The RAID controller is a Rosewill RC209 that uses a Silicon Image controller chip. I have had it through 3 mother boards and it's probably at least 5 years old and the manual says it supports 150 gigs/sec
http://www.rosewill.com/products/s_7...ductDetail.htm

I might have a solution to the problem that nVidia won't let me load the RAID drivers without seeing hard drives on the RAID controller. I am going to connect my old 80 gig hard drives that I still have laying around and see if I can load the drivers.

OK, I got the drivers to load by adding a couple of old hard drives. I need to do 2 complete images to 1 external and 1 internal drive before I try the Nvidia RAID controller and I cannot do that until tomorrow.

It appears that the only way nVidia lets you make a RAID pair is by deleting/reformating the drives, so I cannot just use my existing 500gig hard drives unless I am willing to delete all the data. I made a RAID pair using my 2 old 80 gig hard drives and will try a restore of my C drive as a test.
I do not want to delete all my data and then find out that there is a problem.

I am really no longer a nVidia fan. I set up my old SIL RAID card in minutes without deleting/reformatting any of my drives.