RAID1 imaging

[SILENCER00]

I'm just curious how troublesome this would be. If I were to setup two drives in a raid1 setup (with a hardware controller), create an OS partition of about 30G on the raid-array, and then image this OS partition via norton ghost or whatever to a seperate single drive; is it difficult to restore this image through norton ghost's dos interface to the raid-array's os partition?

 

[Lazn_Work]

The RAID 1 partition should look like a single drive to Ghost.

So backup/restore to/from a separate drive should be no problem.

==>Lazn

 

[Snugglebear]

The el-cheapo RAID controllers have a DOS driver stuck in their BIOS so ghost, and other DOS-based utilities, will work. It also helps windows boot, but that's just a side benefit.

 

[SILENCER00]

Its a promise fasttrack 100 raid card, im really hoping this works out. My only concern is that I wont be able to get the raid array and the single drive to boot together.
Last time I tried I could only get the array to boot alone, or the single drive would boot as the primary os drive and the array as secondary. I think I had to set my boot order as "SCSI" first for the array to boot, but then the single drive wouldnt be detected.

 

[Snugglebear]

lol, I've got one of those sitting on my desk. They've got wierd issues, apparently if you don't use Promise's drivers a firmware bug will bite you and cause write performance on an array to be 1MB/s if the array's drives are on seperate channels. Solution is to put both drives on the same channel and magically it's back to normal. Promise never answered my question as to why this happens, but a few people on a couple obscure UNIX newsgroups knew about it.

Anyway, for the most part they work fine. Boot issues like the one you've had are mostly caused by the onboard controller(s) & motherboard bios. The Promise ft100 is capable of running alongside other RAID controllers and getting the boot order correct. If you want to boot off the Promise, choose SCSI, if not, pick the correct onboard controller. Make sure the promise array config doesn't have a boot drive selected or it may try to boot itself after initialization.

 

[Ice Czar]

Ghost compatibility with RAID (Excerpts)

Successfully imaging a RAID drive is dependent on the specific computer model, driver controller, hard drive, and RAID implementation. Symantec provides the following information only as an aid to cloning RAID drives. This information is a suggestion only

Notes on getting Ghost to work with hardware RAID systems
Use similar hardware: Restore the image file only to a computer that uses the same hardware as the source computer. Because the operating system needs the drivers for the array, the drives will be inaccessible on the destination computer unless the hardware is the same.

SCSI or IDE: Ghost's ability to work with RAID arrays is not dependent on whether the array uses SCSI drives or IDE drives.

Mirrored sets in Windows NT: To clone mirrored sets in Windows NT, break the mirror, run Ghost with the -NTIID switch ( -ntiid ), and then recreate the mirror using the Windows NT Disk Administrator. Note that duplexed disks are a type of mirrored set. See the document Cannot migrate Windows NT mirrored or striped sets to larger drives.

Mirrored sets in Windows 2000/XP: Symantec Ghost 7.5, 8.0, and Norton Ghost 2003 support cloning a mirrored partition in Window 2000 and Windows XP provided that the source partition is on a Dynamic Disk and the image is restored to a Basic Disk. The restored partition is not mirrored. See the document Ghost compatibility with Dynamic partitions.

Restore the partition rather than the disk: In some situations, Ghost may be able to restore a partition from a disk image when Ghost cannot restore the disk image

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in the worse case you can still break the mirror and image
of course the downtime that entails is probably why you want to avoid that senerio

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Originally posted by Snugglebear
Solution is to put both drives on the same channel and magically it's back to normal. Promise never answered my question as to why this happens, but a few people on a couple obscure UNIX newsgroups knew about it.

interesting
now I just need to transfer that to long term memory