RAID-1

Is there a RAID expert here?

I have used Acronis True Image V8.0 and more recently V11 Home. And, I have plenty of experience backing up and restoring using my Boot Rescue CD to single hard disks (typically boot drives). Now I have a couple of RAID-1 systems to worry about. And, the boot drive is this RAID-1 drive.

I would like to run a test by making a backup of a RAID-1 system and then swapping out both hard drives to perform a recovery to two new hard drives.
So, should I expect this to work? When I made the Image Backup, Acronis only saw a single logical hard drive as expected.

In my experience, the BIOS controller for the RAID array will format the disks when I replace them and boot up the BIOS. I guess this is because it sees a different serial number, etc. When I re-install the original hard drives, will it do this again? Thereby re-formatting the original hard drives that I am pulling as a safety backup? This could put me with no working RAID-1 system.

The RAID controller is some sort of Intel product in a new Dell Precision T3400.

Tim

 

I have an older Intel ICH5R and have used TI9 to convert from RAID0 to RAID 1. I had some issues later on with what I thought was a bad drive and swapped drives and did a reformat. A TI9 restore worked fine.

At least this all worked for me. I use XP Pro SP3 and did this using a Reatogo CD (BartPE).

 

Re: RAID1

To answer my own question, here is how it worked out:

We have a DELL Precision T3400 with an on-board Intel ICH9R RAID controller. This system was shipped by Dell with two 80GB SATA hard drives configured as a RAID1 array, named ARRAY. The operating system is Windows XP Pro SP3. When the system boots, one can access the RAID console and it shows: Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager option ROM v7.6.1.1001 ICH9R wRAID5.

I am confident in the performance of Acronis True Image using non-RAID drives. I wanted to experiment with RAID and determine if Acronis True Image 11 Home would successfully make and restore backups of a RAID1 configuration. This is what I accomplished.

Step 1, Perform Backup: Make an image backup of the logical disk using TI Boot Recovery CD build 8054. The backup is made over the network to another workstation and the image file subsequently burned to a single DVD-Rom.

Step 2, Experiment with RAID1: Replace one of the 80GB hard drives with a third hard drive (wiped) and reboot the system. RAID shows degraded status, rebuilds the drive, reconstructs the array and returns system to normal operation.

Step 3, Restore Image: Replace both of the 80GB hard drives with wiped 80GB drives. In the RAID console, construct a new RAID1 array using the same volume name as the original. Build 8054 will not perform the restore as it does not seem to see the target logical disk correctly. However, Boot Recovery disk build 8101 is able to successfully restore the RAID1 array from the image.

Step 4, Restore Image to Larger Disks: Replace both of the 80GB hard drives with new 500GB drives. In the RAID console, construct a new RAID1 array using the same volume name as the original. Again Build 8101 (Recovery option) is able to restore the RAID1 array from the image. However, even though it presents an option to resize partitions, it still restores only an 80GB partition. There does not seem to be any way to force partition resizing.

Step 5, Restore Image to non-RAID disks: Reconfigure the system as non-RAID with two 500GB hard drives. Use build 8101 (Recovery Option) to restore the image to the C: drive. Again, it restores only an 80GB partition. Next, use build 8101 (Disk Clone option) to clone the C: drive to the D: drive. The clone option resizes the partition to utilize all 500GB.

At this point, one might make another image backup of the 500GB disk. It seems that such a backup could then be restored to a new RAID1 array, thereby utilizing all 500GB.

Step 6, Restore Original Configuration: Reinstall original 80GB hard disks. Recreate RAID1 array. Use build 8101 (Recovery Option) to restore original system image.

Tim

 

Tim,
Have you tried to take the expanded 500GB disk and clone it to the "C:" drive then setup a RAID1 with the two 500GB drives? This is exactly what I am trying to do but on a Proliant ML350 G3 server.

Step 5, Restore Image to non-RAID disks: Reconfigure the system as non-RAID with two 500GB hard drives. Use build 8101 (Recovery Option) to restore the image to the C: drive. Again, it restores only an 80GB partition. Next, use build 8101 (Disk Clone option) to clone the C: drive to the D: drive. The clone option resizes the partition to utilize all 500GB.

At this point, one might make another image backup of the 500GB disk. It seems that such a backup could then be restored to a new RAID1 array, thereby utilizing all 500GB.