Cloning Sata Drives

[Dezza Bot]

Kinda a slightly different problem here. Normally I'd use ghost but the situation here is I have a 30gb sata drive that I want to clone to 2 drives in raid0. Is this even possible, or does anyone have any other bright ideas I can't think of at 12am

[coogle]

MMM.. Don't know, all I know is don't ever try to use Sata as a boot drive, it always seems to screw up when I do it.

[MR2]

you have 2 problems...firstly you cannot simply copy the data to a third drive then copy back as the OS needs to have the RAID driver installed before it actually attempts to boot...so if you were to move from one controller to another you'd be ok, but can you install both drivers at once?

Edit: V1, you can clone SATA drives easily with the latest version of Norton Ghost.

another option is to use MS backup and backup your config, then start a basic install accross the raid and off you go, at the end of the day it'd probably take as long to implement a copy solution as to do another clean install.

[ViLLaN]

Like he said.. Ghost can do it.. But really, a clean install would be easier ;P

[Watto]

I've actually done this before. Because installing direct to the raid controller i had caused setup to crash.

What I did was:

Install the OS on 1 IDE drive.
Install the RAID card.
Install RAID drives and create RAID array.
Boot into Windows and install the RAID drivers (SYSPREP ???) shutdown
Ghost from IDE to RAID
Remove IDE Drive
Set bios to Boot from RAID array.


This worked for me several times with Server 2000
You might need to run Sysprep where indicated for Windows XP
Like MR2 said SATA drives shouldn't make any difference.
If it fails you still have the IDE drive you installed to so you can still put that back in and try something else.

If you decide to use MSBackup use the ASR option.

If you were using Server 2000/3 you could also create a software RAID 1 break the array and modify to Boot.ini to point to the RAID 0 array. But your not so don't worry.

Good Luck

[Dezza Bot]

Well thanks for all your help, you've collectivly given me an idea.
1. Clone the sata drive onto an ide
2. Boot from the ide and set up the raid and drivers and such on the ide drive
3. Boot from the original sata drive and copy windows from the ide drive to the sata raid.
In theory it should work.. but I'm likley to get inaccessable_boot_device errors, but I'll give it a go

Although clean install sound the go, I might just work on backing up the current config to a spare drive while I wait for the new drives to arrive