Imaging to a RAID 5 drive

[mmnmaniac]

Hello everyone,

I just bought Acronis TI 9 Home Edition, and have been trying to test-backup my RAID-5 setup (I set it with 3 HDD's - it's a home theater PC, so I need big storage and fault tolerance).. I've been playing with it all day yesterday, and I can't seem to write an image properly to the RAID5 array.

As a test, I've managed to make an image of my OS, yank it out, boot via the boot disk, restore my OS onto a new, blank HD - I was able to successfully start again without any problems via this method.

However, when I attempt the same (copy an image) to the RAID 5 array, it doesn't work properly. Everything goes well until I've finished imaging and I'm ready for the reboot - but the new hard drive just doesn't boot. It stops in the black & white screen, listing all drives and motherboard components, displaying "Verifying DMI Pool Data". I've left the machine on for half an hour, and still - nothing happens.

I've tried this 3 times already, and I think that something's going wrong because I'm writing to a RAID array. Is there a workaround for this?

Thanks in advance!

~Steven

Edit: I've also been trying to get this to work via BartPE.. I never figured out how to get the Acronis boot disk to load the RAID drivers necessary for the RAID array.. :(

Edit: Upon searching further, I have a similar problem as the original poster in this thread below - we have similar motherboards:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=124278&highlight=RAID

[mmnmaniac]

well, someone from acronis called, and spoke with me about it a bit. he recommended making a boot disk from the TI Workstation trial and give that a shot. However, the RAID array is now simply not being recognized :( - it's seen as independent disks.

My main goal is to simply find a backup utility that will work with my RAID 5 array. What do you guys recommend?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: I bought TI Workstation, and using that software, the RAID array was recognized. The Home Edition just doesnt seem to work with RAID.

[azarby]

Whose RAID array is it? I had similar problems with a 4 drive Intel ICH7 RAID 5 array. After several weeks with almost daily email exchanges and information dumps, with Acronis Technical support, Acronis came to the conclusion that the Intel RAID5 hardware was not supported with their Linux based recovery environment. Do a search and find my previous posts on the subject.

Azarby

[mmnmaniac]

It's a NVIDIA raid, which, according to other threads that i've found here, is supposed to be supported.

Booting via the Acronis boot disk DOES show the RAID array.. I'm trying to do everything via that now instead of through BartPE.. i.e. I'm making the image after loading up Acronis, changing the RAID disks, and restoring it to the RAID array.. but creating the image is EXTREMELY slow. :(

I'll report back later with my results.

[azarby]

-{ Quote: "It's a NVIDIA raid, which, according to other threads that i've found here, is supposed to be supported.

Booting via the Acronis boot disk DOES show the RAID array.. I'm trying to do everything via that now instead of through BartPE.. i.e. I'm making the image after loading up Acronis, changing the RAID disks, and restoring it to the RAID array.. but creating the image is EXTREMELY slow. :(

I'll report back later with my results." }-

I'm glad its working for you. They wanted me to try BartPe also. I have used BartPe in the past, but when you buy a product to perform a specific task, you shouldn't have to create your own OS environment to make it work. If Acronsis would only abandon the kludgy Linux mode of operation and go to a BartPe style environment, they could leverage a multitude of Windows compatible drivers and get a product that would not be as troublesome as TI 9.0 is. Until they come up with a product that is useable by the masses, they will always remain a niche solution. For all the debugging and troubleshooting that the users of this forum are doing, they should be paying us to use their product, not the other way around.

Good luck, I hope the process you are using works for you.

azarby