Help with moving disk around and not reinstall anything.

[CalifLove]

Hello All,

I currently have 2 640Gig drives running in RAID 0 in my system. I have another 4 of those drives ready to install as well. The current set is partitioned into 3 - D - Boot, E - Games, F - Media .

My goal is to take all 6 drives and run RAID 5, however I need to get the data off of the first two drives before I can make that happen.

I went and bought a 1 TB external My Book drive and have copied the contents of my original two drives to it in folders.

My question is, what is going to be the best way to go about restoring the data - specifically the boot drive, once I get the 6 disk RAID 5 setup. Also, I fear that with the new drive setup, the system is going to re arrange my drive letters - any thoughts on how to do this w/o causing huge pain for myself?

Thanks in advance.

 

[the last resort]

that is going to be relatively hard. just copying will not work, you will need a program like Norton Ghost. Use it to make a partition on the external, then setup the RAID 5, and then use Ghost to bring everything back. It should work. I know Ghost can do boot things with no problem. However, this sounds kind of like what I wanted to do, and I got a MASSIVE headache from what happened.

Basically I was running a slow 160GB drive, so I got a new 640GB drive. The 160 also had some bad sectors, which was the real driving force. When I got the drive, I used Ghost to try and copy stuff over. Turns out that the edition of Ghost I have won't run on XPx64, so I install XP32. It works, and then halts about 30% through. I checked, and it appeared that it copied everything. So i unplug the old drive, and try to use the new. Wont boot. I check my partitions. My main boot drive is now B, and it is a logical drive (still is!!). On top of that, the other partitions are now gone. Found out that Windows had converted them to hidden NTFS, so i just changed them back with Ghost. Eventually i get everything running, after 2 days without a compy (laptop wouldnt work either) after deciding to just do a completely clean install, which I should have done a lot sooner to get rid of a ton of bloat ware. All in all, its working so im happy.

 

[leo2kp]

The best way to do all of this without "causing a huge pain" for yourself is to just backup your data and reinstall. At least with that you generally know how long it will take and what it entails. If you decide to try a transfer using Ghost or anything else, you're not guaranteed anything and you could spend days trying to get it to work, and then you end up reinstalling anyway. Good luck with whatever you decide

 

[CalifLove]

Thanks guys for the help.

I decided to buy and download Ghost from Symantec Store (Stupid me, I should have got it when it was like $20 bucks a few weeks back..argh!). It is currently in the process of creating images of all of my drives and copying over to the external. Funny - timer says 14 more hours...jeeeez! Hopefully this will work, I could not find any option in the backup wizard to copy the MBR and such and can find no information if that stuff gets copied to the image file.. I guess I'll find out shortly. I imagine that if I can get the image restored it shouldn't be too much trouble to rebuild the mbr with a windows disk of some sort?