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I'm going to upgrade from Asus P5Q Pro (P45 chipset) motherboard to Asus Prime H270M-Plus (H270 chipset) motherboard.

Currently, Windows 10 boots off RAID1, made with two hard disks (using Intel ICH10R Raid), in BIOS mode (P5Q Pro don't even support UEFI).

I'm going to replace motherboard/CPU/memory, but keep the hard disks. I'd like to have the new board to boot with UEFI.

Given the boot process change, and Intel RST version change, will Windows boot at all? Is there anything I can do prior to hardware upgrade to leave Windows bootable, or is there anything I should do to fix it after the hardware upgrade?

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    As you're pretty much changing every single component of the system you probably could try to do a sysprep but that's as good as reinstalling (almost). Also changing RAID controllers isn't easy usually. You might need to clear the disks. Though Intel RAID should be more forgiving.
    – Seth
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 18:03
  • @Seth: sysprep will leave nearly everything intact (except activation), right? I'm not sure why you say it's "almost as good as reinstalling"? I'm reading on sysprep right now, and I don't see any downsides...
    – haimg
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 18:56
  • It really depends on what you actually do but most of the time you would use the generalize option which would for example delete any setup up users (at least to my knowledge). So while software might still be installed you might be missing registry keys and so on. I'm not sure about the details but you should be careful if you try it. :)
    – Seth
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 19:39

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I would go about it this way:

1) Break the mirror, and designate one of the two drives as your boot drive. Reboot into Windows to ensure that your OS partition is still viable.

2) Change your hardware out for the new components, leaving the second drive out of the system. Boot into Windows again, to ensure your OS partition was recognized.

3) Shut down the system, install the second drive, and then rebuild the mirror "from existing data" using the first drive as your Primary drive.

Practical upshots: by holding the second drive in reserve, you should have a bootable copy of the OS even if the primary gets hosed up. Also, by breaking the mirror and rebooting off of one of the drives before you change out your chipsets, you've not changed the hardware too drastically, and you likely will not need to reactivate Windows during any of the steps. Theoretically.

(this is the process we follow with servers that have had a RAID controller failure - if for any reason we can't just reactivate the mirror once the new RAID controller is in place, we then break the mirror and rebuild it from the existing copies.)

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  • A good approach but I would still make sure the data's backed up on another medium, especially because in step 3 you don't really have any redundancy yet.
    – BrianC
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 20:59
  • That's why you have to be methodical about it. :)
    – George Erhard
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 17:05
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It's hard to say FOR SURE until you try it (so make a backup) but in general Intel's RST is very resilient about version/controller changes.

Since the signatures are stored on the disk, you should be able to just hook them up, setup the BIOS to the same mode (RAID1), and be good to go.

I personally went from a P35 chipset to a Z97 chipset a couple years ago, and it worked as I've suggest above.

After I was done, I simply went and upgraded all the drivers to the latest version.

Intel has a document published about this:

Moving a RAID Volume to a Different System

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  • That article that you referenced says this: "If the new system includes a different I/O controller than the one on which the RAID volume was created, you should not attempt to boot to the RAID volume." This is not exactly encouraging...
    – haimg
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 18:44
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    Nope, but it's just a warning. It's also why I suggested ensuring you make a full backup before attempting. ;)
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 19:05

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