Imaging and redeploying on hardware RAID?

We have several Windows XP boxes running on a Intel Pentium 4 (Springdale-G motherboarD). On top of that we have Promise RAID cards running two drives in a mirrored array. Has anyone had success imaging and then redeploying to RAIDed systems? We're using Acronis Snap Deploy 3.0. I use a boot cd to both create an image, and to set it up for deploy since the mobo doesn't support PXE.

While trying to research, Acronis seems to say it supports hardware RAID without any extra steps. I can successfully create an image, but when I try to redeploy, the pc immediately reboots after I complete the deploy setup on the management server. We are using Promise TX100 and Promise TX2300 cards. It would be preferable to be able to image between the two types, but currently I cannot deploy an image created from the same pc.

I have not had a chance to try using Universal Deploy, as I am waiting on a license upgrade issue to be resolved. If I loaded the RAID drivers into the MassStorage while doing a Universal Deploy would I have better luck?

 

Ok, so I got my license issue worked out and had a chance to use universal deploy. After several tries manually loading drivers, I actually was able to deploy onto a pc that was running a different RAID card than the first pc. I'm doing more testing, but as long as I can reliably replicate this it will be a great solution for backing up important pcs.

 

I'm having similar problems. What steps did you use to get the correct drivers loaded using Universal Deploy? I've whittled the drivers list down to the bare minimum ICH9R called for by the controller and it still fails.

Any help is very much appreciated.

 

It's been a while since I got it working, and in between we had to move our Acronis server and templates, so when I tried again I had some problems. I had changed several things though - I was using smaller drives than the original image had, and I was moving to solid state.

I was using a Promise Fastrack 2300, and I set up the RAID 1 array in the RAID bios beforehand. I then used Snap Deploy 3.0 with Universal Deploy.

Under Universal Deploy I added the drivers both on the "Mass Storage Device Drivers" page, and on the next page, the "Driver Location" page. Under manual options I believe I had to set it to "As in Master Image" on the Disk Utilization. It seemed like it pushed the image on, but after reboot the Windows screen would come up, and it would reboot again.

I did not have to do this before, so I'm not sure what I did different, but I though of unplugging one of the drives. It booted fine under 1 drive. I then went into Windows, loaded the proper Windows RAID driver, shutdown, plugged the second drive back in, went into the RAID bios, and it the array was rebuilding itself. Currently waiting for the rebuild to finish.

It's time consuming to fail, but twice now I've been able to get it working eventually.