Transferring image from one drive to a RAID 0 pair

Evil-I

Evil-I

Evil-I

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Hi All,

I'm just about to replace my single Samsung F1 drive in my main machine with a pair of Samsung F3s in RAID 0 using my Abit IP35 motherboards on board raid.

Is there an easy way to transfer the partitions etc from my existing drive to the array? I've done drive to drive before using various tools, but never drive to array.

Many thanks for any suggestions,

E-I
 
If you want to copy your existing Windows install to the new drive, then it's not very easy to do because your Windows install is not loading up the RAID0 drivers for your boot drive.

Simply imaging across the F1 to the RAID0 will cause it to BSOD. If you can install the RAID0 drivers on your current install then take the image using something like Acronis True Image, it should then work.

If it's just transferring the data then you can install Windows on your new RAID, then use Windows to create your new partition and move the data from your old drive.
 
Evil-I said:
Hi All,

I'm just about to replace my single Samsung F1 drive in my main machine with a pair of Samsung F3s in RAID 0 using my Abit IP35 motherboards on board raid.

Is there an easy way to transfer the partitions etc from my existing drive to the array? I've done drive to drive before using various tools, but never drive to array.

Many thanks for any suggestions,

E-I
Click to expand...

Hard drive vendors release soft which is used for data transfer, including partition move. When I've changed Seagate HDD in my wife's computer, I used a Seagate DiscWizard:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Samsung should have done a similar application, but You can try DiskWizard as well, maybe it works with your HDDs.
 
ChileanLlama said:
If you want to copy your existing Windows install to the new drive, then it's not very easy to do because your Windows install is not loading up the RAID0 drivers for your boot drive.

Simply imaging across the F1 to the RAID0 will cause it to BSOD. If you can install the RAID0 drivers on your current install then take the image using something like Acronis True Image, it should then work.
Click to expand...

Very good point, hadn't really considered that bit.

Its also a dual booted machine booting Windows 7 and Fedora Linux 12, so the potenitial for not being able to sort the appropriate RAID drivers across both OS's is pretty high. Guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and re-install everything.

Another thing has just occured, I need to check that Fedora will successfully work with the ICH9R RAID controller. In the past I've had issues where linux will only see the component drives of a software based or bios assisted software based raid array (which most onboard RAID is). On my home server I ended up bunging in a 3Ware hardware RAID card to solve the issue as I wanted serious amounts of drive space but also needed proper RAID 5 fault tolerance.

Time for more research I think! At least its a non-destructive upgrade, I can try out the RAID bit and if its not really working just bung the old drive back in.

Thanks for all the help guys!

E-I
 
I'm no Linux expert, but could you add the 2 new drives as RAID0 as "slaves" to your boot drive.

Would that give you an idea as to how Linux would treat them? Even though they are not the OS drive?

Good luck with it :)
 
ChileanLlama said:
I'm no Linux expert, but could you add the 2 new drives as RAID0 as "slaves" to your boot drive.

Would that give you an idea as to how Linux would treat them? Even though they are not the OS drive?

Good luck with it :)
Click to expand...

I'll give it a try, just can't remember if I can mix normal volumes and RAID volumes on my Abit IP35, need to have a look in the bios to see what the options are.

Task for this evening I think, I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks again,

E-I
 
On my P45 Asus P5Q Deluxe if you've installed with SATA in RAID mode you can then have a single non RAID drive installed, the RAID BIOS just scans the disk and states something like non-RAID disk found and Windows can see it no probs.

There is a registry hack around which does allow you to change from IDE to ACHI/RAID modes or is it ACHI to RAID. I ran my system in ACHI and used the hack to get it into RAID mode.
 
Ahh good point - will you be running the drives on the same controller (ICHxR)? And do you know if you have it set to IDE or AHCI?

When you switch the controller over to RAID mode, single drives run in AHCI - you wouldn't have a problem with mixing single drives and RAID drives. But if you're currently in IDE mode, you'd need to do a registry tweak for Windows to force load the AHCI drivers before you reboot...or you get that BSOD again :o
 
ChileanLlama said:
Ahh good point - will you be running the drives on the same controller (ICHxR)? And do you know if you have it set to IDE or AHCI?

When you switch the controller over to RAID mode, single drives run in AHCI - you wouldn't have a problem with mixing single drives and RAID drives. But if you're currently in IDE mode, you'd need to do a registry tweak for Windows to force load the AHCI drivers before you reboot...or you get that BSOD again :o
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure the existing hard drive is running in AHCI mode so it sounds like I might be okay?

I'll prod it all with a pointy stick this evening and see what happens.

Thanks for all the advice,

Best

E-I
 
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