Ghosting main IDE HDD to new SATA RAID 0 array - help?

bad_monkey

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Apr 3, 2006
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Hi,

I currently have a Seagate IDE HDD as my primary.

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF9 Ultra, with nForce4 Ultra (SATA-II command queing etc) chipset.

I intend to buy two new SATA II drives and set them up in RAID 0 running off the motherboard controller.

I have Ghost 10, as I use it for back-up.

Now what I want to do is
1) install the new drives and set 'em up in the BIOS as RAID
2) start Windows as per normal, install drivers etc as necessary
3) Ghost the main drive to the new array
4) restart and set-up the array as the primary boot device
5) remove the old drive.

Anyone an expert with Ghost?

Does anyone see any problems with the above plan? Should I use the Ghost boot CD instead of doing it through Windows? If so, what complications might there be with regard to the driver for the RAID?

Will a "mirror" work, from a single drive to an array, with regard to the boot sectors etc?

Appreciate any comments.
 

timberwolf1

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I would (and I do) make an image with Norton Ghost, onto yet another drive (can you borrow one or something?) failing that you will need to write it all to DVD or something, which may not be feasible if you have a lot on the HDD.

Once you have that, install the RAID setup, then once you know the drives are working, boot up with a norton disk, write from the image (where ever you decide to keep it) onto the new RAID setup, should work a treat, I used this method a year or two ago to go from IDE to a SCSI setup on my server.

I know there are probaly easier solutions, but it works for me as the server boot drive at the time only had 4gb of data on it, so it was a single DVD. I like it because I know it works.

I would not do anything to the original HDD untill you are sure the new setup is fully working.

Do you have space on the IDE, that you could infact write its image of it to itself?

Best of luck
 

bad_monkey

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Thanks Gary.

Why do you say I need an image, on a 3rd drive or DVDs?

We're talking about ~120GB, so DVDs would **** me off, but I can get hold of another drive if need be. But I just intended to follow my plan of action above: leave the existing drive in, copy straight off it. There's no risk as it never needs to write to the original drive, the boot thing is just a BIOS setting. Or am I missing something?

If I boot to Ghost using the boot CD, what issues are there with regard to getting Ghost to recognize the RAID array? (This is why I suggested doing it in Windows, which Ghost 10 can - although I suppose there is something to be said for solving the drivers-at-boot issue now in anticipation of future reinstalls of Windows etc).
 

bad_monkey

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Thanks Paul, tho I'm still not seeing the advantage in doing that

- it's two Ghosting operations, instead of just Ghosting the existing IDE straight to a single partition on the new RAID array
- and is further complicated by the fact that there may not be enough room on the array to double up like that.
 

boracus

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Well why don't you make a custom boot disk with the necessary raid drivers, so the dos environment will see the raid drive? Usually there are some kind of dos drivers available.

I don't know the specific's but you should take a look at the ghost options and use a file copy ghost, or what ever it is called. Because if ghost tried to use disk geometry to copy the old drive it wouldn't work.