Ghost from Raid0 to Single Drive not working?

I currently have a Maxtor Raid0 setup with two 80gb 2mb satas. My main windows partition on it is 30gb.

I formatted my new Hitachi T7K500 320gb to 30gb and 268gb partitions, both primary.

I tried ghosting the main windows from the raid0 to my hitachi, and everytime i get back into windows, the 30gb partition on the hitachi is corrupt or something.

i tried this numerous times... tried a PC Dos boot ghost disk, and also tried it with Ghost 2003 from windows (which boots to dos anyways)...

just doesn't work! please help me out... thx.

Have you tried DriveImage XML ? It has an option for drive to drive transfer.

Just remember to activate the boot partition at the Hitachi 30GB partition, the one at disk management screen when you right click the partition and enable "Mark partition as active".

Edit : Just realized driveimage xml is now version 1.21, mine is still at 1.18 ! Going to download it right now !

might wanna try Acronis True Image also.

@Fr3@k3r : Does Acronis "evaluationware" version can restore the image it saved ? Or it must be purchased 1st to be "fully" functional ?

bing said:

@Fr3@k3r : Does Acronis "evaluationware" version can restore the image it saved ? Or it must be purchased 1st to be "fully" functional ?

Click to expand...

Last time i needed a trial from acronis, Acronis Provided FULL working Retail Trial Ware. All Functions Completely Work.

bing said:

Just remember to activate the boot partition at the Hitachi 30GB partition, the one at disk management screen when you right click the partition and enable "Mark partition as active".

Click to expand...

I have to do that AFTER I do the partition-partition copy, or before? I tried doing it before copying partition (right after i formatted it to 30gb), and Ghost 2003 wouldn't let me choose it as a destination partition.

ok added the error i get... whenever i try to access the drive from windows explorer..

and yes, just marked the partition as ACTIVE... =/

maybe it has to do with how i'm going from a raid0 to a single hdd? i didn't think it mattered...

g0dM@n said:

maybe it has to do with how i'm going from a raid0 to a single hdd? i didn't think it mattered...

Click to expand...

It shouldn't matter unless you needed specific drivers for the controller in RAID and IDE operation. That's usually the case with add-on controllers, but not chipset integrated ones. If this is on the NF4 RAID/SATA controller, it shouldn't be a problem. Give the other programs a shot and see if they fail. Also, have you ever been able to access the drive from booting off your original array and just initializing it in Windows? You don't have that specific port the Hitachi is on set to Enabled under the RAID section in the BIOS do you?

tuskenraider said:

Also, have you ever been able to access the drive from booting off your original array and just initializing it in Windows?

Click to expand...

Yes, I have been able to access it... I wondered the same thing, so I formatted the 30gb partition on the Hitachi and tried to see if I can at least put files on the partition (wanted to make sure I didn't corrupt the hdd or something - my knowledge is rather limited with hard drives).

tuskenraider said:

You don't have that specific port the Hitachi is on set to Enabled under the RAID section in the BIOS do you?

Click to expand...

No, I don't have it enabled... it's a SINGLE drive... I didn't think I had to... I'm trying it right now... enabling raid on the single drive.... what does raid do on a SINGLE drive???

-----------------------------

And... you said something about the onboard sata... either way, I need sata drivers to get windows installed the first time, so....

g0dM@n said:

No, I don't have it enabled... it's a SINGLE drive... I didn't think I had to... I'm trying it right now... enabling raid on the single drive.... what does raid do on a SINGLE drive???

Click to expand...

I mentioned it as something to double check and make sure it wasn't enabled, that's all.

g0dM@n said:

And... you said something about the onboard sata... either way, I need sata drivers to get windows installed the first time, so....

Click to expand...

If this drive is on one of your NF4 boards, you shouldn't need drivers to do an XP install on a single SATA drive on it's controller. Anyway, I'd try the other programs mentioned to do a reimage.

Hrmm, I am suprised this would work.

When you do a raid 0 setup you are writing to 2 drives as fast as you can in no particular order in order to speed up your writing times. However, when going from a raid 0 setup to a single drive setup how does the image now know what drive to access for the information that was say on drive 2? I can see raid 1 working because both drives have the exact same info. Lets say you have Nero installed on a raid 0 setup... Half of your files could be copied on disk1 and the second half one disk2. So now you ghost the image of drive 1. Well all you are capturing is the information that was stored on one drive (theoretically). Windows only knows drives as drives, it doesnt even recognize it as a raid drive within windows unless you load the specific controllers drivers/monitoring software. Then the 3rd party program will show both logical drives within the app. I guess I would like to know how this works. Considering if you ever were to lose a drive in a raid 0 setup your SOL.

TechJunky said:

Hrmm, I am suprised this would work.

When you do a raid 0 setup you are writing to 2 drives as fast as you can in no particular order in order to speed up your writing times. However, when going from a raid 0 setup to a single drive setup how does the image now know what drive to access for the information that was say on drive 2? I can see raid 1 working because both drives have the exact same info. Lets say you have Nero installed on a raid 0 setup... Half of your files could be copied on disk1 and the second half one disk2. So now you ghost the image of drive 1. Well all you are capturing is the information that was stored on one drive (theoretically). Windows only knows drives as drives, it doesnt even recognize it as a raid drive within windows unless you load the specific controllers drivers/monitoring software. Then the 3rd party program will show both logical drives within the app. I guess I would like to know how this works. Considering if you ever were to lose a drive in a raid 0 setup your SOL.

Click to expand...

The third party program doesn't see two drives, it sees one drive just like Windows does. There are programs that don't recognize some RAID controllers and of course, then it doesn't see any of the drives connected to it. I've done images from RAID0 to singles, singles to RAID0, RAID1 to singles, etc., etc and with multiple imaging programs. As long as the program recognizes the controller it'll work fine. Heck, I use Drive Image 2002 which was created when SATA was barely even in existance on motherboards and it reads current SATA/RAID controllers with no problems. Great program.

All programs, including ghost, see the raid0 as regular drives...

I cannot take this anymore, and going with a full install on the Hitachi... I'm really ****ed b/c to this day I haven't had a successful USEFUL ghost copy or restore from image... any time I have gotten it to work was just testing...

I'm so agitated... I was so happy buying Norton Ghost instead of using trial stuff or free stuff, and in fact it DIDN'T pay off... if it's user error, I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

TuskenRaider:

Can you please elaborate how you did this? I wasnt saying it cant be done, I was asking how you could go about doing this. I feel if you could provide how to do this it would be much more helpful then simply stating it can be done.

I use raid all the time here, and the third party programs do detect the raid array as two seperate drives. A raid array is not considered a drive and never has been. A raid array is defined as a Volume. If you are referring two both drives showing as a volume I would agree. However, there is still the fact that the two drives are being written to as fast as possible in a raid 0 array and the data would not be complete if you were to ghost the image because it would still look for the second disk to complete the array. IMO, it is no different than pulling the secondary disk because you are effectivly doing this when you ghost the image and then do not put in the second drive.

If you were to use something like VMWARE and use their converter tool I would agree that you could create a successful duplicate on different hardware. However, using home edition ghost I do not see how this would be accomplished. So if you could please describe the steps you took to get this done we all would appreciate it.

Here is a picture of a raid array on a customers machine that I am deploying using the 3rd party tool provided with the raid controller. As you can see it does show both drives.

TechJunky said:

TuskenRaider:

Can you please elaborate how you did this? I wasnt saying it cant be done, I was asking how you could go about doing this. I feel if you could provide how to do this it would be much more helpful then simply stating it can be done.

I use raid all the time here, and the third party programs do detect the raid array as two seperate drives. A raid array is not considered a drive and never has been. A raid array is defined as a Volume. If you are referring two both drives showing as a volume I would agree. However, there is still the fact that the two drives are being written to as fast as possible in a raid 0 array and the data would not be complete if you were to ghost the image because it would still look for the second disk to complete the array. IMO, it is no different than pulling the secondary disk because you are effectivly doing this when you ghost the image and then do not put in the second drive.

If you were to use something like VMWARE and use their converter tool I would agree that you could create a successful duplicate on different hardware. However, using home edition ghost I do not see how this would be accomplished. So if you could please describe the steps you took to get this done we all would appreciate it.

Here is a picture of a raid array on a customers machine that I am deploying using the 3rd party tool provided with the raid controller. As you can see it does show both drives.

Click to expand...

don't see the pic... =/

though i just saw the link to the pic as i QUOTED you... ODD... i'll img tag it for you... maybe cuz you're a new member? who knows... anyways, here is the pic you tried to img tag:



*edit*
p.s. wow, i guess tag is off in this thread or something is wrong... i'll just link it for you:
http://upload7.postimage.org/170463_a9d5d61a8089e7cfdde99a69bbe95f01/raid.jpg

GM,

I've had nothing but bad luck with Ghost with the exception of one (1) time where it actually worked... i would keep making images of disks... but by the time i needed them, they were always corrupt, or not valid images.

The version that made me give up on Ghost all together was Ghost 8, never tried the later versions since $79.00 for a prog that doesn't work for you gets old after a while.

The only program i have had that actually worked for my purposes was Acronis Drive Image.


~ Gos

TechJunky said:

TuskenRaider:

Can you please elaborate how you did this?....................

I use raid all the time here, and the third party programs do detect the raid array as two seperate drives. A raid array is not considered a drive and never has been. A raid array is defined as a Volume. If you are referring two both drives showing as a volume I would agree.

Click to expand...

I'll be happy to, but I just saw this and I'm off to dart league. Symantecs aside, my programs list and see the "array volume" typically as "Disk1" with the entire size of the two disks combined listed as the capacity. I'll post up pics with Drive Image 2002 and Acronis True Image Home 10 late tonight. Drive Image XML has also worked but I'll forgo that.

Goshawk said:

The only program i have had that actually worked for my purposes was Acronis Drive Image.


~ Gos

Click to expand...

Is it free? This sux cuz I have the full retail package for Ghost 10 and 2003.

You might try doing the image to the single drive but DONT mark the partition as active...

If it will let you do that, then after done imaging, remove raid array, boot to XP cd and do a recovery console fixmbr

this will make the 30GB bootable.


Just a thought

g0dM@n said:

Is it free? This sux cuz I have the full retail package for Ghost 10 and 2003.

Click to expand...

Acronis is 30 day trialware and it works fully. Drive Image XML(FREE) was also recommended in the second post and it'll do an image of the RAID to the Hitachi right within Windows. I suggest you try one of those next to see if you problem persists.

TechJunky said:

Here is a picture of a raid array on a customers machine that I am deploying using the 3rd party tool provided with the raid controller. As you can see it does show both drives.

Click to expand...

Here are the pics of my two 36GB Raptors seen as one drive(Vista):

Drive Image 2002:



Acronis True Image Home 10: