Imaging one disk from a RAID 1 set?

[nej]

Hi all,

First post - be gentle!

My situation is this: I've got an Adaptec 1210SA RAID controller (most of the work done by Windows drivers) running on a Win2k3 SBS machine. The two drives are Western Digital 200GB SATA drives. They are striped in a RAID 1 array.

One of the drives has failed, and I've learned there are compatability issues with these drives and this RAID card, so I've got 2 Seagate drives to replace them. But, I can't rebuild the array to the Seagate drive (or any other drive for that matter - I've tried a couple of others). It always fails and I think the reason is because of the incompatabilities between the existing WD drive and the RAID card (timeout issues).

My plan is this: install the remaining WD drive into another machine without a RAID card, just plain SATA connectors on the motherboard. Use True Image 10 (Home edition) to sector-by-sector image this to one of the Seagate drives and then to restore that image to the other Seagate drive. All being well, this should be an exact clone of the old WD drive and boot as part of the array. I can then rebuild the other Seagate drive with the Windows RAID software.

Will this work!!! And if so, how do I do a sector-by-sector image in True Image?

Any help greatly (and urgently!) appreciated!

-Nej.

[MudCrab]

The sector-by-sector image will be done by TI automatically if it can't recognize the partition format. You can't select it as an option.

Just for clearification, RAID 1 drives are not striped, they are mirrored. RAID 0 drives are striped.

Does the computer still boot into Windows? If it does you could build a BartPE cd that includes your RAID drivers. That way you could do the backup from Windows to another internal hard drive or USB drive and then install the Seagate drives, boot from the BartPE cd and restore the image.

If you try it your way, make sure to make an image of the entire drive. It may work just fine this way.

[nej]

Thanks,

Good idea about the BartPE - might try that as Windows boots fine.

I did think about putting an IDE drive in and cloning to that drive from Windows, building a new RAID with my new disks, booting from the IDE and cloning back to the new RAID.

Off to try in a little while, will let you know what happens.

PS - I know perfectly well that RAID 1 is mirrored, so I've no idea at all why I typed "striped"! Loose wire in the brain, I think.

[MudCrab]

Originally Posted by nej

I did think about putting an IDE drive in and cloning to that drive from Windows, building a new RAID with my new disks, booting from the IDE and cloning back to the new RAID.

If you have another internal (IDE or SATA, or even an external USB drive) you can certianly try this. It's easier if it works. Another option would be to save the backup image to the IDE drive and then install the new RAID drives, boot from the rescue cd and restore the image to the new array. Just make sure that when you boot from the Acronis TI rescue cd that it recognizes your RAID array and you other drives so that you can do the restore.

[nej]

Well, I had to buy the full version as the trial version irritatingly won't do anything from the boot disk version. No probs as it's very cheap and undoubtedly useful for the future - I just wish the trial version wouldn't let you go through the process before saying "No!"

So I set it cloning to a new drive, which was going to take 6 hours, so I left for the night and went in early this morning. It had frozen my computer with 1 minute 32 seconds to go! Argh! I did try booting it but it didn't work...

So, next step will be do an image rather than a clone and then image back to a new SATA drive, stick that in the RAID and see. If it fails to see it, then image back to the IDE drive and try booting from that. If I can boot from that then I can create the new RAID and clone or image back to it.

A very long and time-consuming process, especially as I can only do it evenings/weekends.

If neither of these work then it's a reinstall of Windows onto a fresh RAID (with a better RAID card!)