sata, raid and ghosting

Steeps · 25 Mar 2007 at 23:44

3 years ago i made the wonderful mistake of raiding 2 drives together in my shuttle in raid0. seemed great at the time having one drive but now i don't need all the space due to expanding the network, and i'd like to modify the shuttle so i only have space for one drive in there. i do NOT want to format the hard drive as i have it set up how i like, even after 3 years of using it i like the way it runs.

currently using ~90gb of the 2x 160gb drives i have in there, and i want to shrink it down to just the one 160gb. is it possible to ghost this onto another identical hard drive, but just using the one 160gb drive. i'm not sure if this would be too complicated due to the raid or not. the motherboard is from a shuttle sb75g2, drives are samsung spinpoint 160gb sata's.

Rambaud · 26 Mar 2007 at 07:46

You will need a 3rd drive to do this.

Steeps · 26 Mar 2007 at 16:48

i have a 3rd spinpoint 160gb sata, however my motherboard only has 2 sata ports which are being used by the 2 raided drives.

Rambaud · 26 Mar 2007 at 17:07

Are you able to borrow a suitable IDE drive on a temporary basis?

Steeps · 26 Mar 2007 at 19:30

the only ide drive i have is on the end of a usb cable in a caddy, apart from a 100gig one i have in another pc that i could empty. if i got rid of as much data as i could from it, would it work?

Rambaud · 26 Mar 2007 at 19:47

You should have no problem cloning from SATA to PATA (IDE).

I am sure not if Ghost supports USB - I have never used USB as it is too slow for me.

infernal · 27 Mar 2007 at 13:14

you can ghost from the raid to a single usb drive providing you have a recent version of norton ghost, it comes with usb support

then when you have your image. get rid of the raid and ghost your original image back onto a hdd. that would be fine.

Russ.

michael baxter · 27 Mar 2007 at 13:17

Acronis True Image?

Rambaud · 27 Mar 2007 at 13:41

Although I have True Image also, I have not tried restoring an image from a USB drive - Acronis's website seems to indicate that this is possible. Not sure if it will work with RAID, instead of cloning?

infernal · 27 Mar 2007 at 18:36

try get norton ghost

russ.

themistry · 27 Mar 2007 at 20:30

Also try acronis true image. But here are some steps for you.

I can in no way take responsibility if this doesnt work, it should, but I have never done it...

1) Install ghost and the 3rd hard drive you have.
2) Create a ghost of your system drive onto the 3rd drive (doesnt matter if its usb/network share etc)
3) Destroy your RAID0 array and install windows onto one of the drives.
4) Install ghost on the new machine and open your image.
5) Restore the ghost image onto the now spare 160 GB drive.
6) Remove all the hard drives, connect the restored drive to be master and boot

hope it help. I know the above works with acronis, perfectly. However with norton ghost... well, whoever did trust symantec?

take some backups!

TM

m_cozzy · 27 Mar 2007 at 21:43

Well I went the other way from a single sata in my shuttle to 2 x 250 in raid 0. I know acronis very well using it at work regularly, it will backup onto usb, onto a network share etc. However I could not get windows over onto the raid controller without blue screening. Installed the drivers 1st, done a detect repair, nothing worked (never have this much grief with scsi & servers).
Had to do a fresh install in the end.

JayMax · 28 Mar 2007 at 00:10

Rambaud said:
You should have no problem cloning from SATA to PATA (IDE)

Cloning to the PATA drive then cloning backover to the single SATA is my best bet also. The mobo does have PATA? I've never used a mini-itx whatnot.
Not 100% sure, but in my ide > sata > sata raid migration if you're working with images rather than cloning then you might have problems trying to restore an image to a smaller volume. Cloning will resize/adjust etc.

Steeps · 28 Mar 2007 at 01:37

so i want to reduce the content to as small as possible, fit the 100gb ide drive i have to the ide controller, clone the hard drive from the sata raid0 to the ide, remove the raid and somehow clone it back to one of the drives using either norton ghost or acronis.

i have 2 more sata disks and another shuttle, i might practice it first on the other shuttle to see what works. will do it next month to see if it works (not much time at the moment i just wanted to see if it was possible.)

infernal · 28 Mar 2007 at 09:05

Steeps said:
so i want to reduce the content to as small as possible, fit the 100gb ide drive i have to the ide controller, clone the hard drive from the sata raid0 to the ide, remove the raid and somehow clone it back to one of the drives using either norton ghost or acronis.

i have 2 more sata disks and another shuttle, i might practice it first on the other shuttle to see what works. will do it next month to see if it works (not much time at the moment i just wanted to see if it was possible.)

hope it goes well for you then!

Russ.