Restoring a basic image to a dynamic drive

Yozzer · 17 Aug 2008 at 10:28

I have a dual boot system, Windows XP and Vista Ultimate all residing on basic disks. I wanted to change the drive used for Vista to raid, so I took a full backup from within Vista using Acronis11.
I then created a raid drive which shows up as dynamic, and using Windows XP, tried to resore the image to the new Dynamic raid system, but having tried the three options, restoring to the Dynamic disk is greyed out, the basic drives all shown. I have read elswhere this is a problem, and I wondered if anyone in this forum new a way to do it.
If I cannot, I will have to rebuild the raid with Vista, a bit of a pain as I thought in my ignorance that backing up and restoring to a different drive with Acronis was not a problem.
Regards, Brian

Deleted member 77746 · 17 Aug 2008 at 10:49

Acronis won't restore to dynamic disk, doesn't support it. You will need to convert it to basic disk. If you have data on there then you should back it up to another drive and then convert it to basic.

Your better off formatting it and starting again to be honest, doesn't take that long.

Yozzer · 17 Aug 2008 at 11:24

Thanks for the quick reply, I am a bit green on raid, can I leave it as a raid drive, and re format it as a basic drive? or is raid always a dynamic drive, and I will need to delete the raid?
The drive is still empty.
Thanks, Brian

Vertigo · 17 Aug 2008 at 16:13

All drives in Windows should come up initially as a basic disk and you have to explicitly convert it to dynamic if you want to.

You are using hardware RAID and not Windows software implementation?

Yozzer · 18 Aug 2008 at 10:46

At the start, I set up the raid configuration in the bios, and used the windows disk management to create a volume and format it and it came up as a dynamic drive, I did not convert it.

I decided to reload Vista, I deleted the volume, and did it all in the Vista install setup, and low and behold it came up as a basic drive.
Even though I had now installed Vista, I decided to try again to resore the drive as it now complied with Acronis in that it was now a basic drive, not dynamic.

All went well, the drive showed up in the restore screen option, but then it rebooted to do the actual restore, but as the raid drivers were not installed following the boot, and no provision to add them as far as I can see in Acronis, it timed out and the restore did not take place.

I tried again from the rescue media, and it was exactly the same.

The conculsion is that if you try to restore to a drive that needs special drivers loading, the Acronis cannot do it.

If my assumption is correct, how do you restore a raid system that requires using Intel drivers? Of course my assumption may not be corrct, so if you can put me staright I would appreciate it.

I will continue and rebuild the system, but will have to try the inbuilt backup program in Vista, as it seems Acronis will not do it.

Regards, Brian

adsyf · 18 Aug 2008 at 11:17

Only a suggestion as I've not done it before, but couldn't you restore the image back to a single disk. Then install the raid drivers, take another image and then restore to the raid drive?

Yozzer · 18 Aug 2008 at 12:14

Thanks for the suggestion, but this image was taken from a single basic disk, and when I try to restore it to what is now a basic raid disk, it reboots and actually does the restore before windows is reloaded. This means that any drivers needed for special disk set ups like the intel raid disk drive appears not to be seen by acronis. The other standard disks can be seen.
I tried just copying the mounted image to the raid drive after installing Vista on to it the normal way, but 4 times it got part way through then Acronis had a serious error and crashed out. I have the full regged version of Acronis with the latest May 2008 updates.
I am now part way rebuilding the raid drive re installing the program's, but I need to be able to do this otherwise backups are a waste of time it seems.
regards Brian