IDE clone to Raid breaking...

Alright, so I'm using a 160gb and a 250gb both mirrored with nvraid through my motherboard. I've tried several ways to copy an IDE drive onto my 1st raid array with no success. My latest attempt was to boot off the 160, load the IDE as another drive, clone the IDE to the 250 and it ends up breaking my raid, windows starts to see 2 x 250gb disk drives. It basically seperates the drives so that they are independant which in turn on bootup, leaves my Raid frozen trying to find it's 2 arrays. I can load windows if I unplug the 250gb drives and reconnect them later getting a degraded error message. From there I enter Nvraid utility on bootup and remake the 250gb array leaving the drive blank and back at square one.

An unrelated problem, I can't boot up to the IDE drive because it's from another computer and the new pc I've built doesn't want to boot up to anything that wasn't made by itself.

What other options do I have or how can I clone a single IDE drive to a raid array without it breaking?

 

you have 2 problems:
1. The windows installation you want to clone, doesn't know anything about being booted from a RAID or on a another machine.
2. I suspect cloning from a single disk to RAID is not possible. Because you may overwrite configuration options of the RAID system, which are stored on the it's HDDs.

 

Hello DreamzProwler,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are very sorry for the delay with the response.

Please be aware that, as b_k has already mentioned above your newly cloned operating system might not boot because of a lack of the appropriate drivers for your RAID controller. The same problem may arise for any other hardware devices that are different from those installed in the machine this single IDE hard drive was residing originally.

We therefore recommend that you prepare Windows for transferring using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep) as it is described in this FAQ article, create an image of the entire IDE hard drive saving it to any type of the supported media (e.g. any internal, external or network drive, CD, DVD, etc.), boot the computer from Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue CD and restore the beforehand created image to your RAID array.

Please be aware that even in case of using Sysprep we cannot guarantee the successful transferring of the operating system to a computer with the hardware configuration different from that of the original machine. The point is that Sysprep allows replacing drivers only for Plug-and-Play devices (sound cards, network adapters, video cards etc.). As for system HAL and boot device driver, they must be identical in the source and target computers (see Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 302577 and 216915).

If you want to be completely sure that the transferred operating system will boot and function normally then we recommend that you use Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation or Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows in conjunction with Acronis Universal Restore (depending on which operating system you use) for your purposes. Acronis Universal Restore technology provides an efficient solution for hardware-independent system restoration by replacing the crucial HAL and hard disk controller drivers. Please read more information on how to use Acronis Universal Restore in the respective Acronis True Image version User's Guide.

We also recommend that you download and install the free trial version(s) of the product(s) you are interested in to see how the software works on your particular software\hardware configuration.

If you want to obtain the free trial version of Acronis Universal Restore then please submit a request for technical support using Ask a question before you purchase Acronis software link. Explain your wish to obtain the free trial version of Acronis Universal and provide the link to this thread in your request.

Please be aware that it is not obligatory to have a bootable Windows installation in order to perform image creation\restoration and disk cloning operations as you can perform these actions when your computer is booted from Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue CD.

Since you use mirroring, as a possible workaround you can also try transferring your "old" operating system to the one of the 250 GB drives and only after that configure RAID array (mirroring) in your "new" computer BIOS.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov