Drive shows as "Unallocated" after cloning to RR2310 Raid5

Drive shows as "Unallocated" after cloning to RR2310 Raid5
The Short Version:
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I am trying to clone a drive onto a 3-disk RAID5 array, controlled by a Highpoint RocketRAID 2310 controller. Everything SEEMS to go fine (including the showing of a progress bar for the actual process, which takes around 2 hours total - so it seems different than the problem described in https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showt...t=unallocated), except that after it finishes and I try to boot off the RAID array, it fails - and if I then reattach the old source drive to boot from again, I find that the disk still shows up as unallocated / unpartitioned space - as though nothing was done to it.

The Long Story:
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Ok, first off, let me explain what I'm trying to do: I'm attempting to upgrade my RAID controller card. My old card is an LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4. The array itself consists of 3 250gb 7200rpm 16mb SATA Western Digital Caviar RE's (prod ID: WD2500YD). As a first step in the upgrade process, I used TI to clone from the RAID5 array to a new 750GB sata drive, using the "Automatic" cloning option. Once I satisfied myself that the newly cloned drive seemed to be fine, I removed my old raid card, installed the new Highpoint RocketRAID 2310, set up the RAID5 array, and let it finish it's RAID5 initialization.

(I should note that I'm confident that the RAID5 array is set up correctly, since at one point I tried putting a new installation of WinXP x64 - the OS I am running - onto it, and it was able to boot off of it just fine.)

Having finished setting up the new RAID5 array, I tried to clone from the 750 gb drive to my new array, again using the "Automatic" setting. (The original array consisted of a single 500gb partition, which the automatic cloning process upsized to 750gb to fill the temporary drive. This means that when I'm recloning back to the new RAID5 array, TI needs to actually shrink the partition - however, since only ~280gb is actually used, and TI doesn't raise any errors / warnings, I'm assuming TI is capable of handling this.)

Unfortunately, as I've already noted, everything seems to work except that I end up with a drive that remains unallocated / unpartitioned. Bizarre...

Things I've Tried:
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When I initially opened window's disk management control panel, I noticed that the new array was not only still unallocated, it was also still unitialized. So, I tried initializing it from here, and then recloning. No luck.

Next, I thought that some residual information from the original RAID5 array might be left on the drives, and screwing up the process, so I unhooked them from the RAID card, plugged them into the motherboard, did on a low-level format on all 3, then plugged them back into the RAID card and set up / initialized the RAID5 all over again. And then recloned. No dice.

Next, I noticed that one of the common problems is with the MBR on the newly cloned disk. (I should note that whenever the cloning process is finished, I have ALWAYS been careful to remove the source drive before restarting windows, and that I always clone into unallocated space.) So, I tried booting into the Windows Recovery Console (being sure to press F6 to load my raid drivers from a floppy), and running fixMBR. No love.

I also tried using Acronis's own MBR fixing utility (gathered from http://www.acronis.com/files/support...owrite_en.iso), as well as a win98 boot disk with the fdisk /mbr command. However, both of these boot environments lacked drivers for my RR2310 card, and so both were a no-go. (If anyone knows how to load a driver for my card for use with either of these, please let me know.)

My next thought was that using the trial of True Image Enterprise Server v9.1 (build 371, instead of the Home v10 trial I had been using, might make a difference. No difference.

I then tried making a rescue disk, and seeing if it would work when I ran TI off that. Unfortunately, the rescue disk didn't seem to have drivers for my raid card, so that led nowhere. So, I then tried making a BartPE boot disk, with the appropriate drivers and the TI plugin provided by Acronis. No change. (...except that now no initial reboot was required, and I could now at least browse the web using the BartPE firefox plugin while waiting 2 hours for TI to again do nothing. Woo! Progress!)

So, at this point, I've basically been struggling with this for the past week, and I now have no new ideas. Pretty soon I will have no hope and no patience. So... please, any suggestions / ideas are welcome!

- Paul

PS - Here are my system specs for those interested:

Windows XP Pro, x64 Edition, Service Pack 1
AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ CPU
2 x 1GB Corsair PC3200 DDR DIMMs
ASUS A8N5X Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 7600GT PCI-Ex16 256MB running ForceWare 93.71
New RAID Card: Highpoint RocketRAID 2310
Old RAID Card: LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4
Raid Drives: 3 x 250gb 7200rpm 16mb SATA/300 Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YD (in RAID5)
Temporary Drive: 750gb 7200rpm 16mb SATA/300 Seagate ST3750640AS

 

I am no expert with True Image, however after reading most of their User Manuals and Knowledge Base articles, there seems to be an implied statement that when transferring a disk image to a new drive, it has to be identical size or bigger;even though you have not used all the space on your original drive. I could be wrong on this, but there manuals tend to hint at this.

 

Well, I haven't seen any official confirmation, but I have seen several posts from people saying that they've been able to clone to a smaller drive... ie, https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=150596, for instance.

However... I guess I've only tried the automatic resizing options, so maybe I'll try the manual ones. At least you've given me an idea of something else to do...

 

Well,I stand corrected. I found in the manual that you can image to a smaller drive as long as the actual contents of the old drive can fit on the new drive. Sorry I if I mislead you. You do bring up a good point. Perhaps this will work with a smaller drive but only if you manually resize your partitions to be smaller.

 

Well, I never was able to get TI to work, so I gave up and tried Casper XP. If anyone else is having similar problems, I suggest giving it a shot, it worked flawlessly (if a little slowly) for me...

 

Hello elrond79

Thank you for using Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please download and install the latest build (4940) of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home trial version.

If the problem persists, please collect some information to let us investigate the issue thoroughly:

Please create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Please keep RAIDs in question connected during creation process.

Please make a screen shot of the Device Tree application the way described in this previous post.

Please also collect the exact vendor and device names of RAID controllers and drives in question.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov