Well, I got it working and imaged... seems it wouldn't boot -at all- without hanging until I disabled Acronis startups in safemode... after that though, it turns out the conflict was with Avast! Antivirus and/or ZoneAlarm firewall. after uninstalling both, Acronis installed without a hitch and I was able to image.
As of right now, though, I can't boot after restoring the image... leading up to this was a bit of a hassle:
My original 500GB array looked something like this:
[__C:_(SYSTEM)__|______________E:_(DATA)____________]
I used ycopy to copy the E: partition directly onto the new 1.5TB HDD.
Then I used Acronis True Image Home to make an Image of the C: partition and MBR.
This seems to have been my first mistake, because excluding E: from the image meant I couldn't restore the entire disk as one operation.
After Imaging it and installing XP onto an IDE HDD (temporarily) along with the necessary RAID and SATA drivers and Partition Magic, I cleared and rebuilt the array and attempted to restore the image onto it. Here begins to the point of no-return, where anything before this point can't be un-done.
I used Acronis first to restore the C: drive and MBR separately, using the original (default) setting of a Logical Partition for C:, then expanding the 100GB C: partition to 250GB in the process, and leaving the rest of the 1TB array unpartitioned... then I used Partition Magic to add a 500GB partition for expendable data and a 100GB partition for data to be backed up, while leaving 100GB unpartitioned to install Vista X64 onto later. In the end it looked like this:
[__C:_(SYSTEM)__|UNALLOC|G:_(DATA)|_______E:_(DATA)_______]
I went into the BIOS and set it to boot to the array again, and I get just a black screen with a blinking cursor.
I booted back into XP and deleted the two Data partitions I had made in PartitionMagic and tried it again, same result.
I booted from the XP install disk and loaded the RAID drivers from a floppy, then went into the recovery console to run FIXMBR, same result.
Now I seem to be stuck... I can't boot to the restored C: drive.
I DO NOT WANT to re-install Windows on that drive, since I have 99 gigs of custom installed and configured programs which would need upwards of 100 hours of tweaking to get them all back to the way they were when I started.
Is there something I'm doing wrong, or another way I can fix this, so I don't have to start all over again from the beginning?
As of right now, though, I can't boot after restoring the image... leading up to this was a bit of a hassle:
My original 500GB array looked something like this:
[__C:_(SYSTEM)__|______________E:_(DATA)____________]
I used ycopy to copy the E: partition directly onto the new 1.5TB HDD.
Then I used Acronis True Image Home to make an Image of the C: partition and MBR.
This seems to have been my first mistake, because excluding E: from the image meant I couldn't restore the entire disk as one operation.
After Imaging it and installing XP onto an IDE HDD (temporarily) along with the necessary RAID and SATA drivers and Partition Magic, I cleared and rebuilt the array and attempted to restore the image onto it. Here begins to the point of no-return, where anything before this point can't be un-done.
I used Acronis first to restore the C: drive and MBR separately, using the original (default) setting of a Logical Partition for C:, then expanding the 100GB C: partition to 250GB in the process, and leaving the rest of the 1TB array unpartitioned... then I used Partition Magic to add a 500GB partition for expendable data and a 100GB partition for data to be backed up, while leaving 100GB unpartitioned to install Vista X64 onto later. In the end it looked like this:
[__C:_(SYSTEM)__|UNALLOC|G:_(DATA)|_______E:_(DATA)_______]
I went into the BIOS and set it to boot to the array again, and I get just a black screen with a blinking cursor.
I booted back into XP and deleted the two Data partitions I had made in PartitionMagic and tried it again, same result.
I booted from the XP install disk and loaded the RAID drivers from a floppy, then went into the recovery console to run FIXMBR, same result.
Now I seem to be stuck... I can't boot to the restored C: drive.
I DO NOT WANT to re-install Windows on that drive, since I have 99 gigs of custom installed and configured programs which would need upwards of 100 hours of tweaking to get them all back to the way they were when I started.
Is there something I'm doing wrong, or another way I can fix this, so I don't have to start all over again from the beginning?
