Windows Vista x86 and Raid

[GedeB]

I had a problem on my RAID volume (caused by a crash of Quicktime, still not compatible with Vista, don't install, dangerous) and I wanted to recreate the RAID (stripe 2x 400gb).

I read good things about Acronis, so I backed up all drives in one go on a USB drive, and recreated the RAID volume.

Started the restore from the Recovery CD, RAID was recognized by the drivers on the CD, selected the image and tried to restore...

First came an error, something like cannot write to sector 0 ....

But by clicking ignore, the restore went on.... (slow, must be USB 1.1 via the CD?)

Vista didn't want to boot

Reinstalled Vista, the partitions created by Acronis weren't recognized by the Vista installer.... repartitioned again.

Hoping that Acronis would recognize the Vista created partitions, I again booted the Recovery CD, and this time I only restored the C drive.... Again the error about not being able to write to sector one, this time I clicked cancel...

This time Vista wanted to boot how ever... I restored the D drive, also from the recovery CD (my Win installation of Acronis was there), and booted in Vista to restore the other logical drives, but this time, by file restore, and not disk restore....

Worked.

I defragged the drives with Diskeeper, and the D drive (restored by Acronis) needed to be defragged by a boot time defrag. Diskeeper hanged however, and I needed to reset the PC. I then copied all files of the D drive to another disk, and deleted the D drive via the Vista diskmanager, recreated it, copied the files back, and tried the Diskeeper Boot Time defrag. Worked.

In all, it took about a day, to get it all working again, and I hope that my C drive will keep working.....

And, oh boy this Time Remaining indicator, it varies from "1 day and 2 hours" (takes much less) to "1 min and 30 seconds" (and takes much longer) , and the mix up of drive letters when you restore from external USB drive, is also not so handy....

And, at a certain point during restoring with the Restore CD (at the end) Acronis reported a failure of the USB drive (scary ****), later under Vista no problem, so it was not a disk problem.....

It was done with build 4940. I saw a newer build 4942, does this version work now with Vista and RAID stripes?? (I am not going to experiment again for the time being, 4940 definitely doesn't work correctly with Vista, although it seems ok at certain times)

(Asus P5W DH Deluxe, Intel 82801GR/GH, ICH7, Sata Raid)

Hope it was clear....

regards, GedeB

http://www.bali-information.com/