How to restore a disk image to a formatted raid volume w/no OS?
We have a computer with 2 SATA slots.
That computer has 1 160GB drive that is almost full.
The motherboard supports on-board RAID. We will be putting in 2 SATA 500GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration.
The OS and filesystem of the 160GB drive is NTFS/Windows SBS 2003
How can we image the contents of the old 160GB drive onto the new 500GB RAID 1 such that the computer will not have to be re-installed.
The ultimate goal is to grow the storage capacity and add _some_ redundancy w/RAID1 while not having to rebuild the system after the hard drive upgrade.
That computer has 1 160GB drive that is almost full.
The motherboard supports on-board RAID. We will be putting in 2 SATA 500GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration.
The OS and filesystem of the 160GB drive is NTFS/Windows SBS 2003
How can we image the contents of the old 160GB drive onto the new 500GB RAID 1 such that the computer will not have to be re-installed.
The ultimate goal is to grow the storage capacity and add _some_ redundancy w/RAID1 while not having to rebuild the system after the hard drive upgrade.
... You will, of course, need an external drive with enough capacity to hold the image :-)
ASKER
garycase:
I guess the heart of my question is repeated in your list for item (4). How would one do that? copying information on a formatted but bare "drive" or volume, that has no system on it from an external drive, such that the MBR and other important stuff gets written to as well. A simple copy doesnt seem like it would work. The idea is to copy the workign OS back onto the volume and then boot from it. No fuss - no muss. - at least - thats my hope.
I guess the heart of my question is repeated in your list for item (4). How would one do that? copying information on a formatted but bare "drive" or volume, that has no system on it from an external drive, such that the MBR and other important stuff gets written to as well. A simple copy doesnt seem like it would work. The idea is to copy the workign OS back onto the volume and then boot from it. No fuss - no muss. - at least - thats my hope.
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Thanks!
Also - you were right, the onboard RAID (some form of gimp'ed Adaptech) was NOT showing as one volume. I tried GParted Live CD with the onboard card and it was a whole lot of failure.
I went and purchased BootIT-NG and a highPoint RocketRaid 1720 and it all worked like a charm.
I did learn something else. Either I did it oddly, or - making images and restoring them takes a LOOOOOOOONG time.
Anyway - thanks! Your advice helped and the project is done. :)
Also - you were right, the onboard RAID (some form of gimp'ed Adaptech) was NOT showing as one volume. I tried GParted Live CD with the onboard card and it was a whole lot of failure.
I went and purchased BootIT-NG and a highPoint RocketRaid 1720 and it all worked like a charm.
I did learn something else. Either I did it oddly, or - making images and restoring them takes a LOOOOOOOONG time.
Anyway - thanks! Your advice helped and the project is done. :)
You're most welcome.
... as for the imaging time => Yes, an image of a 160GB partition (that's "... almost full ...") takes a long time. I always partition drives with a more modest OS partition (usually 30GB for XP, 40GB for Vista), and keep all of the data on a different partition. That does two things: (1) Images of the OS are much quicker ... mine typically take ten minutes; and (2) if the OS ever gets corrupted and you need to restore from an image, the restore has NO impact on the data (since it's on a different partition).
Also, a hardware RAID card (like you purchased) is MUCH better than the onboard controller ... that was a good choice :-)
... as for the imaging time => Yes, an image of a 160GB partition (that's "... almost full ...") takes a long time. I always partition drives with a more modest OS partition (usually 30GB for XP, 40GB for Vista), and keep all of the data on a different partition. That does two things: (1) Images of the OS are much quicker ... mine typically take ten minutes; and (2) if the OS ever gets corrupted and you need to restore from an image, the restore has NO impact on the data (since it's on a different partition).
Also, a hardware RAID card (like you purchased) is MUCH better than the onboard controller ... that was a good choice :-)
(1) Install the RAID drivers on your SBS2003 system.
(2) Image the system to an external drive.
(3) Remove the current drive; install the 2 new drives and create the RAID array
(4) Restore the image from the external drive to the new "drive".
Done :-)