XP and SATA RAID Question.

[Win2kpatcher]

Hello! Hoping one of your gangsta's can pass your knowledge of this matter on to me. I didnt want to steal the other guys post...

Last night I installed 2X250GB SATA II HDD's in RAID0 everything is cool...what I want to do is image this which I need to play around with a bit...My question is...For imaging testing purposes lets assume I get a good image of my C:\ which is part of the RAID.

If I want to test this image out on another SATA drive I will have to disconnect one of my SATA drives on my system to do so. Will this make me loose all my data or even RAID settings? I will most likely unplug both RAID drives to be safe...then disable RAID in BIOS. When I am done testing and plug these two drives back in set them back to SATA0 and SATA1 and enable RAID again..will it all be just the way I left it? Or will I loose it all? Never dealt with RAID much on a desktop only servers. thanks!

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Common studs you know you want to answer.

 

[Osiris]

will the other system have raid?

 

[office politics]

lol,

i would think that you could image the drives, do whatever to the drives, rebuild the raid 0 setup, and restore the image, np. but you kinda confuse me when you say you want to disconnect one of the drive and test the image.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

No the other setup will not be RAID..sorry for confusion.lol...Ok basically my MOBO only has 2 SATA ports...currently they are occupied by the RAID drives...once I image my C:\ partition..I would like to test that image not on my LIVE new RAID setup..but on a spare SATA150 DUMMY drive I have laying around just to see if the image is good..this means I will have to disconnect at least one of my drives to free up a SATA port. for the dummy drive..then disable RAID in the BIOS since the RAID will not be present...then assuming all goes well with testing, I would plug my real LIVE RAID drives back into the SATA ports and re-enable RAID. Would it just all come back online as it was before??

 

[Osiris]

well that sounds like itll work......but not 100% for sure

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Yea I'm not really concerned with the image part...more so are you able to unplug and disable a RAID in BIOS...then plug it back in and leave off the way it was configured before with all data and settings in tact...I guess I could always find out the hard way

 

[Osiris]

the hard way is usually the best way to learn....

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Damnit Warez I demand your support!!

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Ok in case anyone is curious I have finished my testing and here are my results to share with you all

The answer to my own question was YES. You can unplug any of your SATA drives that are in a RAID setup, disable RAID in the bios, have normal operation of the SATA ports, then plug your SATA RAID drives back in to the SATA ports, re-enable RAID, and it detects the old setup with no data loss (OS and custom partitions on the RAID were perfectly fine).

Now here is some info for those who use hard drive imaging/cloning software and questions in regards to SATA/RAID support.

I was able to successfully create an image of my OS with a SATA RAID 0 setup with both Acronis True Image 9.0 and Norton Ghost 9.0. I was also able to restore both images back to my C:\ with no problems at all. I was surprised I ran into NO problems with SATA/RAID drivers with either program. So if you have a SATA drive you wish to clone take your pick.

Now what was interesting is that I COULD NOT succesfully get the OS to boot when I restored the image from a IDE ATA hard drive. It would launch the XP logo then BSOD and reboot. A FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, CHKDSK, and even windows repair would not fix the problem. I had to restore from SATA to SATA then the OS would load fine..very weird, but I learned a lot these last 2 nights!!! lol. Fun stuff.