Raid 0 and Paragon recovery suite 10

Hi

Sorry, I got the title wrong, it should be about Raid 1 (two mirrored disks).

I have Paragon Backup & Recovery Suite 10

I'm a newbie as far as Raid and Paragon go. I have a Raid 1 setup using two 500Gb hard drives, running windows xp.

Can I make and restore partition images from that setup as if it was a single non-raided drive?

And similarly, can I make and restore file-based backups of the data on the raided drives?

Thanks
Swerdna

 

As far as raid and Paragon are concerned, Paragon uses the disk the same as Windows does, in other words if Windows see's the raid as one disk, then Paragon see's it as one disk.

Paragon won't have any trouble backing up or restoring a raid, but remember that the recovery CD's environment's don't always have the driver's for hardware raid controllers, so they would have to be loaded into the winPE disk to restore to the raid.

Also, I don't recommend using software raid controllers (even the windows utility) because you then need the software running in the recovery environment in order to see the array, which can be problematic. On a side note, software raid setups push the raid controlling duties onto the CPU, which can hurt performance.

 

That's good news.

Re the raid controllers & software: it's an Intel raid-ready motherboard with controller on the board, so no problem there.

Regarding restoring an image and putting the raid drivers in the win PE disk: Restoration would be a rare event, maybe never, so could I do it this way --> switch the raid off in the BIOS and restore the disks one at a time in a non-raided environment with the standard winPE disk, then switch the raid back on again in the BIOS.

 

If it's built into the mainboard and you don't need any windows drivers to use see it (you would have needed to load drivers when installing windows) you shouldn't need to load driver's in the recovery environment.

 

I had to load drivers when installing windows. The main board and bios has a raid controller, but not drivers for the xp operating system. I had to re-make the xp install CD using BartPE and put the drivers on it. Then when xp install started, I was able to direct the install program to the directory on the cd where I had put the drivers.

So, in that case, do you think this option is viable for using the Paragon winPE to restore:

 

Yes, that could work, but I have seen issue with some controllers needing drivers even if the raid is not enabled, I would turn the raid off in the BIOS, boot from the WinPE disk and see if Paragon can see the disks, if it can then you know your plan should work (you can then reboot, turn the raid back on and reboot back into windows), if not then you know you will need to use the WinPE's add drivers tool and load the raid controller drivers in order to do a restore.

 

Thanks. I'll test that next week when I'm on site.

 

With XP 32 and Paragon Drive Backup 10 free, I can backup and restore two sata raid 0 disks on Adaptec controller raid (PCI-Express).
If bios see it, Paragon see it.
Ciao
Danilo