Rebuild SATA drive w True Image 8/796 success

Background:

I had two Maxtor sata 150 Mhz drives on a NVbus raid array & two Maxtor sata 150 Mhz drives on a Si3114 raid array on my Epox Nforce3-250GD 64-bit mobo. I broke those down and went winxp 32-bits on 1st partition NVsatabus1 and Suse 9.2 x86-64 on full disk NVsatabus2. Everything was working well except Partition Magic showed that the winxp disk on NVsatabus1 was double its actual size = leftover raid corruption. I tried to install Suse 9.2 32-bits on a logical partition on NVsatabus1, but Suse could not (or would not) have anything to do with that disk.

I wanted to make the 1st drive winxp clean and not lose my winxp install/setup! I tried many things with a version of True Image that was about two months old. It could not see my drives even in safe mode using the rescue CD.

Successful solution (the one that worked):

With winxp disk still on NVsata1 and a disk that had been on the si3114 array on NVsata2, I ran Maxblast3 on the si3114 array disk-- to clean it up. I made a partition on it exactly the same size of the winxp partition on NVsata using PM8. I ran winxp install thru the format phase to try to get a clean MBR written -- did not want any residual raid stuff on the MBR.

Updated True Image 8 to version 796. I am glad to report that 796 "sees" my NV and Si Sata drives now from the CD version. I then did the clone of NVsata1 to NVsata2 using the new 796 CD in safe mode. It worked!

I now have a "clean" sata drive with a cloned winxp on the 1st partition and Suse 9.2 32-bits installed on the 2nd logical partition (linux swap being on the 1st logical partition).

I have edited Grub & My Suse x86-64 is up on NVsata2.

As soon as I image everything & store it on SIsata1, everything will be perfect.

Thanks for doing whatever you did to Ver 796 & thanks for this forum! Keep up the good work,

Snakedriver