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Best way to migrate data over to larger drives with RAID 0?
I'm preparing to make the move Vista Ultimate to Win7 Ultimate, and at the same time, take the opportunity to increase HDD capacity. My XPS420 currently has two WD Caviar Black 500GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The OS, My Documents, etc. are all on a 916GB partition that is showing up as "OS (C:):", and the rest is the 15GB "Recovery (D:)" partition.
I plan to make a backup of everything prior to installing Win7, and I happen to have two WD Caviar Black 1TB drives available. I have an eSATA docking station. The little I know about RAID 0 is that the data is stored across the two drives in the array. I take it that means I can't just copy an image of my C: drive over to one of the new 1TB drives. and then slap it in along with the other 1TB Drive and boot right up.
What would be the preferred way to backup my current 500GB drives, and move that data over to two 1TB drives? The ultimate goal here is to get the computer up and running with Vista on the 1TB drives and then do the Win7 upgrade. I plan to keep my old 500GB drives with Vista on them for "backup" in case something goes wrong with the Win7 upgrade.
Any help is appreciated.
tgsmith
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January 7th, 2011 03:00
Hi Boldfin,
Unlike a RAID mirror where the second drive is an image of the first drive, RAID 0 treats the two drives as a single drive and stripes the data between the two RAID drives to increase performance. Therefore, you can essentially clone a RAID 0 array to a single drive, disconnect the RAID drives and boot from the single drive.
Normally, when working with a Western Digital drive as either the source or destination drive, I use the free Acronis True Image Western Digital Edition for cloning. It is available here: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 Since you are cloning the striped RAID array to a single drive, this should work for you. Since you are, in effect, cloning a 1Tb to a 1Tb, you should'nt need to adjust the partition sizes for your OS and Recovery partitions. In your case do not use the sector by sector cloning method. When the cloning is complete, Acronis will give you instructions on reconnecting your cloned drive as the boot drive.
I have also used the free Easus Partition Manager software to clone both SATA and IDE drives in Dell computers. For cloning a RAID array to either a single drive or another array, you can use Easeus ToDo Backup. It is available here: http://www.todo-backup.com/backup-resource/clone-raid.htm
Note: In some instances, such as cloning a laptop drive to a laptop drive mounted in an external USB enclosure, the cloned drive would continuously reboot when installed in the laptop. This was fixed by running Vista/Windows 7 Startup Repair.
I hope this information helps. Let us know how you fare.
Tony
tgsmith
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January 7th, 2011 07:00
Boldfin,
First, clone the system to the single drive. In the cloning process, Acronis will ask you if the cloned drive is to be the primary, boot drive. You must answer yes to this parameter. When the cloning is complete, Acronis will instruct you to shut down your system, disconnect the existing primary boot drive, connect and configure the cloned drive as your primary boot drive in the system BIOS. In your case, I would completely disconnect the RAID drives after cloning, and attempt to boot the cloned drive. As mentionned earlier, you may experience a problem when booting. If so, restart the system, press F8 while the Dell logo is on the screen and run Startup Repair. If you have software installed under Vista to manage the RAID array, you may have to boot in Safe Mode and uninstall that software since you will no longer be running a RAID array.
I would leave the RAID drives disconnected after setting up the cloned drive as the primary drive. Once everything is up and running on the new drive, you can decide what to do with your RAID drives.
If Acronis doesn't seem to work as you expect, you can reconnect the RAID drives and try using the Easeus ToDo Backup to clone the RAID system to the 1Tb drive. In fact, you may wish to visit the Easeus site I mentionned earlier and look at some of the FAQs for cloning RAID drive(s) to a single drive.
Keep us informed on your progress.
Tony
Boldfin
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January 7th, 2011 07:00
Thanks very much for the detailed reply. I have the WD version of Acronis True Image, and will use it to clone (not using the sector-by-sector method). Once I have the new 1TB drive all set up with the OS and my other personal data, is there any opportunity to get rid of the RAID 0 configuration? Would I want to do that before installing Win7, or during that process? I'm not 100% sold on RAID 0, even though it was fast, and I never had any issues with data loss.
Boldfin
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January 11th, 2011 22:00
Tony,
I used the WD version of Acronis TI to clone my two 500GB RAID 0 drives to one 1TB drive in an external eSATA docking station. Unfortunately, the cloning process took a long time to complete. I had to let it run all night. The next morning, the computer was in "sleep" mode, and though it woke up with some keystrokes and mouse movements, my monitors never came out of sleep mode. The PC was clearly running, but I couldn't see a thing that was going on. So I have no idea if I gave the critical instruction to designate the cloned drive as the boot drive. I left for work, and let the computer sit as-is. I did not reboot or power down.
When I got back home, the computer had shut itself down. I powered up, and Vista booted up normally. I could read the cloned drive which was still in the eSATA enclosure, and it appears the cloning process completed perfectly. I now have a single 1TB drive with my OS and recovery partitions.
I am concerned about connecting the cloned drive now, since I am not sure if it was designated as the new boot drive. Should I be paranoid? Would it be a good idea to go through the cloning process all over again just to make sure I don't miss that critical step again?
You had also mentioned "If you have software installed under Vista to manage the RAID array, you may have to boot in Safe Mode and uninstall that software since you will no longer be running a RAID array". Are you referring to something like the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" program? There's a reference in my XPS 420 User Manual to this software, and it appears to be involved in managing RAID arrays somehow. But I don't seem to have that exact program it installed on my computer. I have something called "Intel Rapid Storage Technology", which also appears to deal with disk management.
I spent some time on the Easus site reading up on cloning RAID drives, and they had some good info, but none of it explicitly dealt with migrating an OS over along with the data to new, larger drives. Somewhere in my research on this, I seem to have gotten the impression that cloning RAID drives is one thing, and certainly do-able, but having your new larger cloned drive boot right up with the OS, settings, and programs functioning is not going to happen. Something about RAID drivers still being present on the drive, and therefore it won't load the OS properly.
Should I just bite the bullet and slap the 1TB cloned drive in and see what happens? Can one "go back" to RAID 0 simply by renabling RAID in the BIOS and reinstalling my old 500GB drives? I'm a "ask questions first, shoot later" kind of guy.
Thanks again...
tgsmith
2.9K Posts
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January 12th, 2011 15:00
Boldfin,
I just cloned an IDE drive about an hour ago using Maxtor's Maxblast 5 software which is powered by Acronis. The default settings assume that the clone drive will become the primary boot drive.
At this point, you should completely disconnect the RAID 0 drives, connect the 1Tb SATA drive and attempt to boot. As I mentionned earlier, you may have a problem booting for the reason you mentionned; i.e., the RAID drivers are embedded in the cloned drive. If so, you should restart the computer, press F8 and run Startup Repair. That has fixed problems with Vista drives that I have cloned.
If things don't work out, you can disconnect the SATA drive, reconnect your RAID 0 drives and everything should be back where you started. The cloning process does not change anything on the drives being cloned.
Tony
Boldfin
5 Posts
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January 12th, 2011 20:00
Tony,
I followed the procedure, and was unable to boot from the cloned SATA drive. I ran Startup Repair, and after running for a long time, it determined that it was unable to fix the problem. Perhaps something went wrong with the cloning process.
I'll reinstall my RAID 0 drives and repeat the cloning process.
Or maybe I'll just do a clean install of Win 7 on my brand new drive and cut to the chase. I have since learned that this is possible, even with an upgrade version of Win 7.
Thanks again.
tgsmith
2.9K Posts
0
January 13th, 2011 01:00
Boldfin,
The problem is no doubt the fact that RAID information is being included included in the clone. If you had an external USB drive on which you could image your RAID 0 system, then you could use Acronis to create an image of your system on that drive. You would then shut down the system, disable and disconnect the RAID array, connect the 1Tb SATA drive and reboot the system using Acronis on a bootable CD. In Acronis you would select the image on the USB drive, select the SATA drive as the destination, deselect restoration of the MBR track, adjust the drive size, and restore the image to the 1Tb SATA drive. With Windows XP boot problems can be resolved with a repair install. Unfortunately, Vista's Startup Repair doesn't always fix boot problems.
Acronis has a provision to create bootable media for restoration of its images. A bootable ISO of Acronis 30-day trial can also be downloaded from Acronis.
Regarding Windows 7, you can do a fresh install of Windows 7 with the Windows 7 Upgrade DVD. This link describes how you do it: http://home.pacbell.net/dbk4297/windows_7_install_upgrade_vista.html
Tony