Clone 1 Disk from RAID 0 Setup?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by maineiac13, Feb 5, 2008.

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  1. maineiac13

    maineiac13 Registered Member

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    I have a two disk raid 0 (striping) set-up. One of those disks is showing failures so I want to replace it. I would like to simply clone its contents to a new hard drive. I have downloaded a trial copy of ATI11 and it appears that since it operates under Windows it can not detect that there are 2 hard disks which comprise my C drive and thus it wants to clone the entire C drive to a new drive and there does not seem to be an option to just clone one of the drives. Can this be done? One option I am thinking of is to put the bad drive on another computer and see if I can clone it from there...but I don't know how windows will recognize that drive. In any event any thoughts on how I can simply clone one of my raid drives to another hard drive?
     
  2. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    If RAID is working properly, any software will see the array as a single logical drive.

    ATI would only see a single drive member in the array if ATI failed to properly address the hardware -- a few folks have noted this probelm when attempting a restore.

    However, the RAID implemementation, whether in softaware or firmware, should have a built in facility for rebuilding an errant drive, provided it is mirrored in the RAID -- which is where the R in RAID comes from and why RAID 0 is really RAID at all ;-)
     
  3. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    I don't think you would have any success cloning one drive in a RAID 0 setup. It would not be recognizable as a regular drive as it contains only half the contents. The only option that "might" work would be the sector-by-sector mode, but I wouldn't count on it. What would mostly likely happen when you tried to boot with the cloned drive and the other drive is you'd end up corrupting the "good" drive.

    A better solution would be to image the RAID 0 setup, replace the failing drive and then restore the image.
     
  4. maineiac13

    maineiac13 Registered Member

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    Thanks for your comments.

    Two other questions then. First, my current set up is two 160gb hard drives that comprise the RAID 0 system. What would happen if I cloned my entire C drive (ie. the two RAID hard drives) to one new 320gb hard drive. Would that new hard drive be recognized as a non-RAID single drive?

    The other suggestion that I image the C drive raises similar questions. First, once having imaged it could I then copy it to a single large C drive...or alternatively back to two new 160gb RAID 0 drives.

    I agree that the RAID 0 system is not worth much...but that is the system that I am starting with though certainly not what I necessarily prefer to end up with. In fact, the best bet might be to move everything to a single 320gb drive and then create a RAID Mirrored system (RAID 1?) with a second 320gb drive. But in any event my main goal is to be sure that I get my system to continue to run properly before something really bad happens with the second drive in my RAID system.
     
  5. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    Yes, it should work to go back and borth between diff drives since whether a drive is actually a RAID of multiple harddisks or not is supposed to be invisible to everything except the RAID controller. To everything else a RAID looks like just another drive.

    You might be better off just making a backup image of the drive so that you can restore the partition with resizing. I think that's the easiest way to do it to move a drive/partition from one size to another.

    One thing that you must take into consideration if you backup from a RAID and then want to restore to a non-RAID -- the backup will have a driver that assumes the target drive is RAID but you will be restoring to one that is not, so before you can boot up frm the drive, you will need to change the drivers.
     
  6. maineiac13

    maineiac13 Registered Member

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    My preferred solution is ultimately to end up with a Raid 1 (Mirrored) setup with two 320gb hard drives comprising this setup. So I guess what I really will need to figure out is once I have completed my imaging of my current C drive (the two RAID O discs) is what I need to do to create a RAID 1 setup with my 2 new hard drives. Not sure what kind of drivers I will need or what steps I will need to go through for this but I guess I will start to investigate how this will work. I wonder if I can just set up the first drive as I copy it from the image I am creating then attach the 2nd drive and go into the setup of the computer and change the drives from RAID 0 set up to RAID 1 set up...will the first drive then be copied to the 2nd drive? Guess I will need to figure out how to do all of this.
     
  7. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    Since you are moving from RAID 0 to RAID 1, Windows will use the same RAID drivers. You should be able to image the current RAID 0 setup, put your new drives in, set them up as RAID 1 and then restore the image.

    If you drop down from RAID to a single drive, Windows may or may not require a driver change. In my tests, Windows would detect the drive change and boot correctly. Going from a single drive to a RAID setup is more difficult and does require the drivers be installed.
     
  8. maineiac13

    maineiac13 Registered Member

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    Thanks....Sounds like what I want to do. Guess I will need to create a cd boot-up disc so that I can access the image I have created to copy it to the new RAID drives. Plus I need to see what if anything I need to do to the drives so they will accept RAID 1 setup.
     
  9. jkb242

    jkb242 Registered Member

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    Raid 0 is what I am running as well but do not say it is not worth much when it is indeed the fastest way to read and write to the drive. It does not have any mirroring and therefore no redundancy that is true but folks select this method of the array purely for speed speed and speed. You cannot beat the reponse. For video capture and rendering speed is most essential as it is with some other mandatory fast read/write processing.

    Acronis seems to have some issue with RAID and SATA drives. That I hope is not true in a broad sence becuase it is a great product-I stoped using Norton for Acronis but SATA and RAID have been far to long for the number of issues I am seeing here with RAID and SATA.

    Best of luck, there are some very talented folks here that can help you. My advice to you if you do not have the speed issue is that you go with one 320Gb drive and be done with it and be very glad that you have one good ATI backup to save you from killing yourself.
     
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