RAID array image onto single disk?

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kevineugenius

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 9, 2006
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Is this doable? I have a 2x250 raid array, which didn't help my performance at all really so it's not a big deal, and I'm going to end up reinstalling Windows pretty quick. I figured while I was reinstalling, I may as well install the new motherboard I purchased about 2 months ago because it was ridiculously on sale. The raid controllers don't match like the last motherboard swap I did, so I imagine all the data on both drives will be lost. Not a huge deal as I can move it all on my network, but it'd be so much faster if I could just buy a 500gb drive and ghost (correct term?) the whole thing onto that. Then, delete the array, format the 2 250gb drives, and have 1tb normal disk space. Afterward I would likely just put the 500gb drive into a network PC, move files around some and delete the windows and program files directories, but it would immensely save me time in backing up my files, as well as get me some more much needed HD space on the network.
 
Don't quote me on this, since I have *not* tried this myself. You *should* be able to ghost it just fine. Reason being when the ghosting application (in this case Ghost) tries to read from the RAID array, the controller / software will read the array itself and pass the information onto Ghost. Ghost would never see parity information (not that you're using it) and shouldn't affect the ghost process at all.

Having said that though, Windows likely won't like it. As far as it's concerned, it was always booted off of a RAID array, moving files to a single disc is gonna confuse the hell out of it.

So, yes, you should be abel to Ghost the array onto a single disk. No, the OS probably won't boot afterwards (though you'll have your data backed up).
 
Using Ghost or anything similar is likely to result in failure, unfortunately. Windows doesn't like changing what controller the boot disk is attached to. If you just want to get your documents and so forth off, though, just copy them (drag-n-drop) with Windows Explorer, then reinstall Windows and programs and so forth, then copy them back.
 
i once cloned everything from a single drive to raid 0 and after some time back to a single drive using Acronis true image , after that i disabled the raid array to use them as single disks... no problems at all . Only thing is if you want to switch your mobo that all the drivers from your old one are gonna be cloned too . ;)
 
Yeah, after thinking about it I'll just do it properly. I was hoping to delay that inevitability until Vista released a service pack or actually because useful so I dont have to re-do it again.
 
It should work. You will need to make sure:

1) Windows XP has the drivers for the new controller BEFORE you take the image from the Array. This way, when you blast the image onto the new drive and it's on the new motherboard, it will know how to work the new drive controller.

2) Your new drive has the same ARC path in your BOOT.INI as your old RAID array.See This

Ghost isn't so low-level that it makes a difference if the data is on an array or not.

Riley
 
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