Hello,
I am currently using a Western Digital 120GB ATA 133 hard drive. I
have my operating system and programs on the drive. I use Norton Ghost
to keep Ghost images of the drive in case of a crash or failure. I
have a Gigabyte motherboard that has 2 SATA controllers with raid
onboard. I am thinking of trying a Raid 0 configuration for the first
time. I just bought 2 Maxtor 80GB Sata-150 drives. I was wondering if
the ghost image I have could be imaged on to the future Raid 0
configured Maxtor Sata drives? Or will I have to install everything
from the beginning (operating system, and programs)? Any advice would
be appreciated.
Thank you!
GA-K8NSC-939
AMD Athlon 3000+ 64 Bit
Windows XP Pro
Raid O Configuration Question?
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Petlydecker
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FlyingPenguin
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Yes you probably can, but you may need to either rebuild the boot sectors or perform a repair install of Windows XP.
Just make sure you keep the old drive as a backup for a while until you're SURE you're happy with the RAID 0 array. Anything goes wrong you can always put the old drive back and put things back the way they were. Never hurts to have a spare drive anyway.
Before explaining my recommended procedure, let me give you my opinion on RAID 0: unless you're using an application that will specifically benefit from it, RAID 0 is really a waste. You are going to greatly increase your chance of data loss due to a drive failure (more than double your chances according to statistical theory) and gain little or no noticeable performance improvement in most apps and games.
You will see slightly faster load times in games or apps that load lots of LARGE files (like Quake engine games, HL2, etc, which store map elements in large archived files). You'll see little improvement in games or apps that load lots small files.
The big benefit of RAID 0 used to be for video editing, but it's totally unnecessary now. Modern drives are much faster than they used to be with monstrous amounts of onboard cache.
If you DO use RAID 0 you had better have a good backup strategy. Any critical data needs to be backed up daily or weekly depending on how mission critical it is, and you need to make regular Ghost images of your boot partition (once a month or whenever anything major changes).
With that aside, let me proceed:
- If your motherboard requires a separate Windows driver installed for the onboard SATA controllers, install it FIRST from within Windows (if you haven't already) BEFORE doing anything else. You need to be able to see the SATA controller listed in the Device Manager with no errors. If the drivers are pre-installed before you clone the old drive to the array, there's a good chance you may be able to get away without a repair of any kind.
- Shut down and connect the drives for the RAID 0 array and create your RAID 0 array. You usually create the array through a BIOS boot menu. Check your mobo's manual.
- Use the Norton boot floppy or boot CD to boot into Norton and clone the old drive to the RAID array (Drive to Drive copy). As far as Norton is concerned the RAID array will appear as a single 160Gb hard drive.
- After the cloning process, shut down and disconnect the ribbon from the old drive.
- Boot into BIOS and make sure that your SATA array is setup to boot first in the boot order before any IDE drives (usually you want the boot order to be Floppy->CD->SATA0).
- Try booting into SAFE MODE first so you don't mess anything up. If it boots into safe mode then you're probably good to go. Reboot into normal mode. Windows will likely detect the array as new hardware the first bootup and may ask you to reboot after it detects it.
- If you try to boot into safemode and you get a BSOD or some boot error of some kind then you will need to repair the boot sectors or perform a Windows Repair install.
First try a sector repair:
Boot from the XP Installer CD-Rom. If the installer doesn't detect a hard drive then reboot into the installer again and press F6 when prompted to, to install additional SCSI or other controller drivers. You need to have the drivers for the SATA controller handy and unzipped onto a floppy disk.
Choose the "Repair from Recovery Console" option during setup, and run the Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run the FIXBOOT command at the command prompt. Reboot when it's done. If it works, you're golden. If not, you'll need to do a repair install of Windows.
Instructions for a repair install are here:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
Hope this helps...
Just make sure you keep the old drive as a backup for a while until you're SURE you're happy with the RAID 0 array. Anything goes wrong you can always put the old drive back and put things back the way they were. Never hurts to have a spare drive anyway.
Before explaining my recommended procedure, let me give you my opinion on RAID 0: unless you're using an application that will specifically benefit from it, RAID 0 is really a waste. You are going to greatly increase your chance of data loss due to a drive failure (more than double your chances according to statistical theory) and gain little or no noticeable performance improvement in most apps and games.
You will see slightly faster load times in games or apps that load lots of LARGE files (like Quake engine games, HL2, etc, which store map elements in large archived files). You'll see little improvement in games or apps that load lots small files.
The big benefit of RAID 0 used to be for video editing, but it's totally unnecessary now. Modern drives are much faster than they used to be with monstrous amounts of onboard cache.
If you DO use RAID 0 you had better have a good backup strategy. Any critical data needs to be backed up daily or weekly depending on how mission critical it is, and you need to make regular Ghost images of your boot partition (once a month or whenever anything major changes).
With that aside, let me proceed:
- If your motherboard requires a separate Windows driver installed for the onboard SATA controllers, install it FIRST from within Windows (if you haven't already) BEFORE doing anything else. You need to be able to see the SATA controller listed in the Device Manager with no errors. If the drivers are pre-installed before you clone the old drive to the array, there's a good chance you may be able to get away without a repair of any kind.
- Shut down and connect the drives for the RAID 0 array and create your RAID 0 array. You usually create the array through a BIOS boot menu. Check your mobo's manual.
- Use the Norton boot floppy or boot CD to boot into Norton and clone the old drive to the RAID array (Drive to Drive copy). As far as Norton is concerned the RAID array will appear as a single 160Gb hard drive.
- After the cloning process, shut down and disconnect the ribbon from the old drive.
- Boot into BIOS and make sure that your SATA array is setup to boot first in the boot order before any IDE drives (usually you want the boot order to be Floppy->CD->SATA0).
- Try booting into SAFE MODE first so you don't mess anything up. If it boots into safe mode then you're probably good to go. Reboot into normal mode. Windows will likely detect the array as new hardware the first bootup and may ask you to reboot after it detects it.
- If you try to boot into safemode and you get a BSOD or some boot error of some kind then you will need to repair the boot sectors or perform a Windows Repair install.
First try a sector repair:
Boot from the XP Installer CD-Rom. If the installer doesn't detect a hard drive then reboot into the installer again and press F6 when prompted to, to install additional SCSI or other controller drivers. You need to have the drivers for the SATA controller handy and unzipped onto a floppy disk.
Choose the "Repair from Recovery Console" option during setup, and run the Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run the FIXBOOT command at the command prompt. Reboot when it's done. If it works, you're golden. If not, you'll need to do a repair install of Windows.
Instructions for a repair install are here:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
Hope this helps...
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Petlydecker
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- Location: RI, USA
Thank you
Thank you for everyones help and for the information. I guess it really does pay off in the long run to use a backup program like ghost or true image. Thanks again for your time and replies.
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Petlydecker
- Genuine Member
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- Location: RI, USA
Reply
It worked correctly. Thanks for everyones help and their time.