Replacement SATA HDD RAID1

AndyMoody

AndyMoody

AndyMoody

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I had a DISK BOOT FAILURE message on my PC the other day. I was using RAID1 with the Sil3114 controller. I tried one of the 2 drives into the other SATA sockets and it fired up fine, the other drive gives error beeps and won't boot. I'm assuming it has failed. On the motherboard sockets 1-4 are for NVIDIA controller SATA-II and 5-8 are for the Sil3114 SATA-I
I don't think I have the NVIDIA controller software installed so its using the one built into XP?
If I was install the NVIDIA software for RAID1 and added a new SATA-II HDD would it allow me to mirror the data from my working drive on to the new one?
I was looking at one of the WD RE3 320Gb drives.
Then if I removed the 160Gb drive and added another WD RE3 drive would it allow me to mirror that one so I'd have 2 x 320Gb drives and could put the 160Gb into a caddy for external use.

Might be silly impossible questions but I can't find any info to say it will or won't work.

Andy
 
the easiest thing to do would be add your two new drives as a new raid 1 array, and then use Acronis Trueimage to copy your old drive across. If you do it the way you suggest you will end up with a 160 GB partition on your new drive, which you will then have to work to resize. You will also be stuck using the SIL3114 controller, as you cannot easily raid across seperate controllers.

Download the latest Nvidia chipset drivers for your board and install those. You likely have installed them in the past otherwise things like lan and onboard sound would not be working, but it is still worth getting the latest version. Install the two new drives and set them up as the raid array you require via bios setup, then use Acronis to copy old drive to new drives, and once that is done, problem solved and you will have a new 320 GB 'c:' drive.
 
Thanks for the reply. You can see I did a bit more testing since the other post you answered. I've not had any experience of Acronis so I'll have a good look into that. I was also looking at adding an external drive too, am I right in thinking I can use one of the eSATA things, £3ish + VAT from OcUK that plugs into the SATA socket on the motherboard to give my a socket on the rear, is it as simple as that?

I take it the trial version of Acronis won't do the job?

Andy.
 
I think you should just install the SATA controller software and "repair" the array so that it auto copies the data back on to the new drive. Its the whole point of RAID 1!
 
That was my plan, then remove the 160gb fit the second 320gb and do the same again. Sounds simple in theory, in reality will it work?
 
Hmm. Come to think of it I am not 100% but I think perhaps it would give you 160GB on the 320GB drive, then once you have both the 320GB drives running the RAID1 array you might be able to create another raid 1 array with the left over space on the 320GB's.

I am pretty sure you can do this with the Intel Matrix storage controller using an intel controller, but I am not 100% that you can do it with an nvidia controller, so you might need to clone your drive like Pandobear said!
 
I think that that I used the trial version of Acronis once to do a similar task, it is worth downloading and giving it a go, there is no info on their site that I could see that indicated it was limited in any way. To tell *** truth though, it really is a handy product to have, particularly if you intend to have an external drive for backups
 
My mate has downloaded the trial as he has an external drive and it seems to do what he wants with backing up his stuff. I'll download it once I have my drives otherwise I guess the 15 day trial will start counting down.
 
I need a bit more advice on this before I attempt it.....
I got my 3 x WD500 gb drives and have put one inside the caddie, not plugged it into the PC yet though. I downloaded NVIDIA MediaShield Storage and went to install it on my current OS XP Pro. It gets to the point saying this.......
NVIDIA Storage Driver Information
----------------------------------
(WARNING - select CANCEL now if you do NOT want to install NVIDIA storage drivers)

The NVIDIA Storage driver consists of 3 components:

1) NVIDIA storage driver optimized for nForce SATA controller that will replace the driver that came with Windows.

2) A RAID controller driver which is required if SATA RAID is ENABLED in BIOS

3) RAID Manager application software

Note for Windows XP:

To install OS onto SATA disks when RAID is enabled in the BIOS, you MUST do the following:

- use the "-x" option with the package .exe to extract storage driver files
- follow instructions for Windows F6 install in "IDE\<os version>\driver\READMEF6.txt"

Which is where I cancelled as I was unsure what would happen after I installed it. I wish to clone the data off my current 1 working 160gb drive using Acronis True Image 11 to the external eSata drive, then connect up either 1 or both the other 2 500gb drives and clone back from the external and then RAID 1 the internals finally using the external as a backup.
I understand I need to enter the BIOS to enable RAID and then I'm unsure what exactly I need to do in what order. A friend did offer to help but lives 50 miles away and do to work is finding it difficult to get time to help me, thought I'd try myself but worried I'll mess it up and have a disaster on my hands.
 
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The message is explaining how to create a floppy driver disk if you wanted to do a fresh install. You are not wishing to do that so, no problem installing the driver as you had intended. Once you have installed the driver you need to make sure that the nvidia storage controller is enabled in the bios, it is likely that it will be already. Set this for RAID operation, then shut down, connect your new drive, enter the RAID bios, ensure that the new drive is listed, you may need to create a single drive raid array to get the OS to see the drive, boot into Windows and then use Acronis to clone the drive. You should then do the same with your two drive array.
 
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