gis_mapper

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May 20, 2005
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I currently have two 80 Gb SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration. I now want to purchase two 250 Gb SATA drives and copy my current drive data across without re-installing everything.

How can I do this? I'm using a PROMISE FastTrak s150 TX2 Plus controller card. I have also just purchased Norton Ghost and have a 100 Gb IDE drive attached to the controller that I suppose I could "Ghost" to.

Thanks!
 

pat

Expert
It is just a supposition, but, what if you remove one drive, as it had fail, put the 250gb there, rebuilt the array, remove the other 80, put back the other 250 and rebuilt the array again.. RAID1 is mirroring, fail safe.. so it may work.. but I'm not sure what will happen with 2 different sized HDD.

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jim552

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May 1, 2003
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Good thought Pat, and it will work to a degree.

You can "fail" one drive on the array on purpose and replace it with the larger drive, and remirror to the larger drive. This can be repeated for the other drive as well.

I have had the best luck in "failing a drive" by shutting down, removing one drive, installing the new drive, and then power up with the power on the new drive off. Once the system has powered up completely then apply the power on the new drive. The Promise controller should remirror automatically when it sees a "blank new drive". (I use removeable drive carriers so the power thing is likely easier for me.) At times when I boot with a good drive and a blank drive the Promise controllers have gotten confused and locked up so that is why I generally avoid that.

Now, data will be on the larger drives.

The "paritions", however; will still be the same size as before. If don't want to change the size of the boot parition then this may work for you. (For the non-boot partition you can copy the data onto your 100gb drive, and then delete and recreate that parition under a larger size then copy the data back onto it.)

The last factor is "does Promise" store the size of the logical drive, the array, to present to Windows in the array data on the drive or is that determined based on the "smallest drive in the array at boot time"?

If it is stored in the array data on the drive, then it won't see the extra capacity. If it does what some RAID controllers do and determine the logical drive size to present to Windows based on the "smallest drive in the array at boot" then Windows will see a larger drive with a bunch of unpartitioned space. (Which is what I suspect is the case.)

So it may be worth a try.

If you are going to use Ghost, which I use often, be aware that under some configurations Ghost will not be able to Ghost drives on a Promise controller.

Sometimes you will need to use the "onboard controllers" in order to Ghost the drives. (Since it doesn't always work, I always use the onboard controllers.)

If you don't have any onboard controllers then you will need to try to use Ghost with the drives on the Promise controller.

To use Ghost on the "onboard controllers" you will need to make sure the BIOS is treating those SATA controllers in IDE mode and not RAID mode.

One original drive, and one large drive and Ghost away. Ghost will allow you to change the parition sizes during the Ghosting process. (Although sometimes if you make the sizes smaller, it doesn't work properly. Larger paritions always seems to work properly.)

If you are going to try to use the drives on the Promise controller at the very least you will need to remove your RAID 1 configuration and create two RAID 0 arrays. One array will have one of your original drives, the other will have one of the larger drives. (NOTE: Each array will consist ONLY of 1 drive.)

Try to Ghost!

If Ghost works boot up the first time with just the larger drive on the array in RAID 0 and then see if it comes up.

If all seems good add the other larger drive and recreate your RAID 1 array. Remirror and you should be all SET!
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
PowerQuest DriveImage 7 works fine with RAID arrays. It boots like XP Preinstallation Environment, complete with the "F6" prompt.

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davemar14

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Feb 7, 2003
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Yup. Ghost 2003 didn't work with my 2x74GB Raptors in RAID 0. As soon as it installed, it crashed when trying to find RAID drivers. Oh well, have to try DriveImage.

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Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
That's because Ghost is a Norton product. All of their products suck. That's why Norton bought Powerquest...to get rid of the competition.

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davemar14

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We use Corporate Ghost at work in the technology department. We have clones on the server, and we finally fixed a packet issue. It really rips now. If I am another school I can just download the clone remotely. Its pretty nice. Ghost works fine on our machines since they are all IDE drives. Gay Ghost doesn't support SATA or RAID. Hey Crashman, I could setup an account on my FTP, and you could upload DriveImage to me. I searched for it online, but can't seem to find it. LOL.

My System:
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Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
Nope, if Norton users are lucky their will be DriveImage improvements to Ghost. But in all likelyhood they bought the company to kill the technology, like Creative did with Aureal.

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