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.

I bet many of us have reformatted our hard drives, reinstalled Mircosoft Windows, reinstalled all of our software applications, and reset all of the Windows settings, etc, you know what a time-consuming and generally a heinous task it can be. But sometimes, after a nasty spyware attack or when Windows has accumulated too much sludge, that kind of radical reconstruction is absolutely necessary. And Vista will only amplify the problem. before you move to Vista, make sure you back up your system.

Many PCs come with recovery CDs that will restore your system to factory-new conditions, but you can get the job done a whole lot faster and add all your favorite programs and system settings to the restoration point by creating a recovery partition. A partition of course, is a cordoned-off section of your hard drive that gets its own drive letter. All you need is the right software and enough available space to hold your information and its applications.

The “right software”, in this case, is a partition utility and a backup program that can create a compressed “image” of your newly reformatted and reloaded hard drive.

I’ve used Symantec’s Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 and Norton’s Ghost 10.0 which allows you to mirror copy your information over to the partitioned drive. However you can use any nondestructive partitioning utlity and back up applications of your choice. And all you need to do is create a partition that’s large enough to hold your infomration; then backup your primary drive to the newly made partition. If and when the time comes to restore your system, run Norton’s Ghost or any other kind of mirror imaging transfer software and expand the backup image to your primary drive. Bingo: You’re back in business before you know it.

1 Get started
For the best results, start with a fresh install of Windows, then load your software applications that you use regularly, utilities, drives. Make sure to install all of the latest updates for Mircrosoft Windows and your Security Software; firewall and anti-virus, etc. Finally tweak your system so it’s exactly the way you like it: video resolution, wallpaper, and all that kind of stuff.

2 Create the partition
Start up PartitionMagic (or a similar utility) and create a partition with enough available space to hold Windows and your apps. Ten Gigabytes should be ample for most users (remember, the backup imiage will be compressed), but consider making it larger if you have a lot of installed programs or storage space to burn.

3 Options Options
Unless you’re going to dual-boot with Windows 9x, which can’t read NTFS, NTFS is the right file system. As for the partition type, the active partition is the one that boots the system. You need to create a logical drive (that is, one you can assign a drive letter to), which will live in an extended partition, the application takes care of that part.

4 Set up Ghost
Run Ghost (or a similar utilty) to create a new backup. Don’t bother with scheduling, as this particular back up is a one-time-only affair. Disabling your anti-virus and firewall prior to starting the backup is a good idea as these can tend to get in the way and ruin a perfect backup.

5 Scheduling backups
Incidentally, take advantage of Ghost’s backup schedules to update your backup incrementally every week or so. That way you’ll always be sure that your information is constantly being backed-up when it comes to restore. If you’re using an external hard drive, make sure to leave it on and plugged in. For the record, this really isn’t a subsitute for off-site or off-PC backups, especially if the partition is on the same hard drive as your data and programs. If the drive goes belly uyp, you’re out of luck.

6 Recover
To use the recovery partition, make sure you’ve backed up all your vital data to another drive or removabe media, then boot your PC with the Ghost CD loaded in the optical drive. You’ll then be able to restore from the partition to your primary drive resulting in a ready-to-roll PC wtih all your applications, dirvers and settings loaded.