Making an image of a pc with raid 0

[kempkajl]

Hi, can I just make an image of one of the hard drives? Our imaging system requires the physical removal of a hard drive to make an image.

If I can just image one physical drive, then how would the restore go if one or both of the drives fails and I use the image I created to image a drive and put it back in the raid array?

Thanks, Jeff

 

[HEXiT]

not quite sure what your getting at. if you have a 3 disk raid 1 setup then the data is mirrored onto the 3rd drive, then if 1 of the 2 primary drives fails your data is protected on the 3rd.
you then replace the drive that failed and copy your data back to the now fixed raid.
im not sure that you can remove the 3rd drive and say use it as a primary boot bypassing the raid altogether.

 

[kempkajl]

hex!t, the raid consists of only two drives, and I want to create an image by just taking one drive out and imaging it.

Will I be able to use this image to restore the raid array if one or both of the hard drives fail?

jeff

 

[HEXiT]

no because your likely to be using raid 0 on a 2 drive only raid.
meaning half the data is on 1 drive and the other half on the other.
basically the drive writes alternately to each drive so all data is split between them both. so greater speeds can be achieved.


if 1 drive fails on a raid 0 then both are usless till reformatted.

the only way to make sure is if you mirror the raid on to a drive thats x2 the size of the single raid drive. its the only way to have redundancy on a raid setup, i think that is called raid 10 striping with mirroring

if you have raid 1 which is mirroring you basically are just copying what you have on drive 1 onto drive 2 with no speed increase only redundancy protection.

but in essance what the answer to what your asking is no...

 

[kempkajl]

thanks Hex!t.

 

[kempkajl]

I actually figured this one out, with the help of colleagues at work. It was actually RAID 1 and I simply imaged one drive, since they're mirrors.

Thanks for the comments.
Jeff

 

[HEXiT]

i guess you didnt understand it when i mentioned it. and had to actually work through it, to see what i ment. not to worry thats how most of us learn.
but now that you understand the concept of mirroring. you may want to try striping with mirroring.
you will need a minimum of 3 drives.
say 2 1tb and 1 2tb
set the 2 1tb 1's up as raid 0 then use the 2 tb drive to mirror the raid 0 config.
the benifits of this is more speed and redundancy. if the raid 0 fails you still have the mirrored data which you can copy back on to the repaired raid 0 easily.

 

[kempkajl]

Best answer selected by kempkajl.