The World of Computing and Solutions

Transferring Mirrored RAID 1 Data

Question: My motherboard supports two SATA drives through the Intel connection. I have a Maxtor 140GB and a WD (Western Digital) that’s 160GB large in RAID 1, which is in two partitions. I need to replace both with 300GB drives and mirror what’s on the 140GB drive to the new drives, wtih new partitions so I can use the full 300GB. How do I get the current mirrored information that includes boot Windows XP to the 300GB hard drives?

Answer: Actually there’s many ways to do this, but the far easiest method is to use a partition tool like the Symantec Ghost, or Acronis True Image. Either of these will do the trick and clone a hard drive or backup EXACT copies of the disk, inlcluding the registery files (called a disk image) to the files for archiving.

Since there’s two SATA connections, it’s likely to be a multistep process. The current versions of Acronis and Ghost support back-up to optical drives, other hard drives including external drives, and over the network. Install the imaging software on your system and then create a bootable CD or DVD containing all of the software you need to restore the disk image, from the application.

With just two SATA ports you will need another physical drive or DVD burner. The physical drive could be external (USB or FireWire), or an internal IDE Drive if your motherboard has free IDE DVD’s (about 15 to 20 DVD R-single-layer discs for 80GB of actual data). If you use a hard drive, make sure it’s at least as large as your RAID array.

Be sure to enable any error-checking options on the disk-imaging software. If one of the DVD-R discs is currupt, you’ll lose all of the data. Imaging your hard drive can take serveral hours. As your data is precious, consider making a second copy/back-up.

Once you’ve backed up the hard drive images, power down the system and remove the existing hard drives without formatting them or destroying the data. Make a note of which SATA port each drive was connected to at the time.

Set up your new RAID 1 Array with the RAID BIOS set up, then insert the bootable CD you made ealier and boot into the image-restore utility. You can then clone the disk image onto the new RAID array. Once that’s done, you should be able to boot normally from the hard drives. The process of setting up the RAID mirror might change the boot drive order. You can correct this via the system’s BIOS Set up.