probably need to make sure that Acronis can create a bootable image from your existing image.
The image I created was bootable, I have restored it to a spare mechanical drive and it worked fine. However the same method didn't work when restoring to the RAID drive? Its weird I don't understand why it didn't work. If I boot up with the spare drive and look at the RAID drive all the data appears to be there but it just wont boot from it.
you need to have the raid drivers already installed into the current os
the only way to do that is to set to raid before you install windows,there are reg hacks to trick windows into installing the raid drivers(without re installing windows) ive done it to enable ssd caching works fine
then you could restore your os/image to a raid array (once you setup the raid in the console)
I think the raid drivers were installed and operational as I did a few registry tweaks to get the PC to boot after changing the bios to raid. I did have bother getting the tweaks to work though in the end I used the marvel controller and put my boot drive on that, then set the intel controller to raid mode. This installed drivers and when I connected the boot drive back to the intel controller in raid mode windows booted with no problems. I then imaged this using Acronis and thought it would just be a case of creating the raid array, booting from the Acronis CD and restoring the image to the array, But it doesn't seem to have worked like that
Thanks for all the suggestions, I must be doing something wrong I just haven't figured out what yet lol.
Another quick question does it matter what the stripe size is set to? I read the documentation and it said the intel software picks the best size depending on the disks and raid type. It suggested I used a 16kb stripe for the raid 0 array with 2x intel 330 180GB SSD's. This is going to be my main boot drive with Windows/Programs and steam games on, I don't know if that makes a difference to what stripe size I should choose?