"Converting" Raid-0 drives to Raid-1

Hi,
I've been searching threads all-over about Raid issues and I'm getting more confused than when I started!

I'm trying to figure out what's the detailed process to migrate my OS and data from my 2x 250GB drives set in Raid-0 to the same set of 250GB drives reset in Raid-1. I thought that I could “migrate” the system and data from the raid-0 drives onto a temporary non-Raid-ed drive and then migrating everything back again onto the original 250GB drives newly rebuilt in RAID-1.
Is that even doable? What would be the best approach/proceed/steps?

For info, my machine is running Win XP-pro on a couple of 250GB SATA HDD in RAID-0 Stripping. The RAID array is managed by the nVidia Raid controller of my 2 year old Asus A8N SLI Deluxe MB.

 

If you know that you can successfully restore to your RAID 0 setup, this is what I would do.

1. Make sure to have at least one Validated backup image of the RAID 0 drive. If the OS/Data is very important you should already have more than one.
2. Change the RAID configuration to RAID 1.
3. Do a Restore to the RAID 1 drive.

If you restore first to a single drive and then backup and restore again to RAID 1, you're just doing unnecessary restores and may get into driver problems depending on the the system.

 

Thanks for the input. If I understand well, I should:

• Create a backup image of my Raid-0 drives (On a CD/DVD I assume)
• Then break raid-0 setup (losing data and OS)
• Configure the drives to Raid-1.
• And "Restore" the OS and Data to that Raid-1 drive by booting the computer from the CD/DVD image of the original Drive.

Is that correct?


That sounds pretty easy, though, by restoring the image of my Raid-0 drive into the Raid-1 setup, is there any foreseeable issue you can think of that would make the whole thing fail?
Also, I heard about "cloning" or "ghosting a drive versus creating a backup "image". Is this the same thing? If not, what is the most appropriate (safe) process I should venture into?

 

You better off doing the backup to a harddisk than to DVDs, if you have one.

A RAID array should look to progs that are read/writing with it jsut like another logical drive -- the aray structure should be "invisible" to the progs using the drive. So it should matter if it's RAID 0 or 1. The only issue that comes up is that diff hardware drivers are sometimes used for RAID and nonRAID, so backing up for one (say a RAID) will save a set up with one driver (the RAID) in place and restoring to another (nonRAID) will put that same (RAID)driver in place, which would be the incorrect driver for the nonRAID set up. You could probaably fix this with a windows repair but why get into it if you don't have to, jsut backup restore from RAID to RAID and not worry about whether it's ) or 1.

 

Shieber,
Thanks for the additional info. I'll come back here to post the results.