Create Raid 0 Using Acronis

[markcynt]

Right now I have XP Pro,XP Pro, and Vista Ultimate installed on 3 partitions. All of the space on my hard drive is allocated by these partitions. The partitions themselves have plenty of space to play with. All of this is on 2 320GB Hdd JBOD.

So my question is, can I set up a raid 0 without losing my installed Operating systems?

Thanks
Mark

Edit: I have Acronis Disk Director Suite and True Image ( I didn't know if that mattered).

[MudCrab]

Do you have the RAID drivers installed in each of your Operating Systems?

What boot manager are you using?

I guess going from JBOD to RAID 0 isn't really any more of a risk.

If your RAID drivers are installed, you should be able to image the drive, setup the RAID 0 and then restore to it. If you have spare drives, I would suggest you test with them. You may not be able to activate your RAID drivers in Windows while in JBOD mode. Also, you'll need to verify that TI can see your drives in RAID mode so you can do the restore. Using spare drives will allow you to play around without risking your current setup.

However, if you have a current backup image of the Entire JBOD setup and have done successful restores (successful booting of all the Operating Systems after a restore), then you should be safe to test on your existing drives.

[markcynt]

-{ Quote: "Do you have the RAID drivers installed in each of your Operating Systems?

What boot manager are you using?

I guess going from JBOD to RAID 0 isn't really any more of a risk.

If your RAID drivers are installed, you should be able to image the drive, setup the RAID 0 and then restore to it. If you have spare drives, I would suggest you test with them. You may not be able to activate your RAID drivers in Windows while in JBOD mode. Also, you'll need to verify that TI can see your drives in RAID mode so you can do the restore. Using spare drives will allow you to play around without risking your current setup.

However, if you have a current backup image of the Entire JBOD setup and have done successful restores (successful booting of all the Operating Systems after a restore), then you should be safe to test on your existing drives." }-

Thanks for the reply. Seeing as I kept my important stuff backed up on a daily basis I just decided to do it the long way but the way I knew would work. I hate all the tedious updating and reinstalling programs but with something like this I wanted to be safe. Anyway I'm writing this on my fresh XP install on my new stripe setup. Then I'll install an XP for my wife and then Vista. But really thanks for the reply I really appreciate it.8)

Edit: What part of CA you from? My wife is from Fresno been there many times.

[MudCrab]

The clean installs are probably just as well. Going from non-RAID to RAID can be difficult on a single OS system and you have three. I was kind of curious how TI would handle the JBOD to RAID backup/restore, though.

I'm in Orland, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, 60 miles south of Redding.

[markcynt]

-{ Quote: "The clean installs are probably just as well. Going from non-RAID to RAID can be difficult on a single OS system and you have three. I was kind of curious how TI would handle the JBOD to RAID backup/restore, though.

I'm in Orland, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, 60 miles south of Redding." }-

I was curious too, but not willing to deal with extra headaches. This is a major operation and major things can go wrong.Thank You Very Much

Mark8)

[markcynt]

I made the partition too small (I thought 6000 MB was 60 GB) so now I have almost no free space. Can I use Disk Director to increase the size of the partition and format with out corrupting my install (which I've already done much customizing to).

Thanks
Mark

[MudCrab]

You should be able to use DD to resize your partitions. As with any partition procedures, I would recommend that you create an Entire Disk Image backup of the drive before doing the partition resizing.

If you're using Vista's boot manager, you may need to repair the BCD file for the partitions that are resized.

[markcynt]

-{ Quote: "You should be able to use DD to resize your partitions. As with any partition procedures, I would recommend that you create an Entire Disk Image backup of the drive before doing the partition resizing.

If you're using Vista's boot manager, you may need to repair the BCD file for the partitions that are resized." }-

I'm all set. I used DD, worked fine. My whole stripe triple boot is setup and working perfectly (after 12 hrs!).:thumb:

Thanks for the replies
Mark