Win 7 Image Restore Question...

[cschlik]

I run 2 Intel x25 G1 SSD's in Raid 0 on my system. I let win 7 do the backup work to a USB drive.
Recently one of my SSD's crapped out on me and started producing errors. I rebuilt the raid and restored from my backup. It worked for a few days and the errors popped back up again (no real surprise).

I want to switch to a single larger ssd for my OS. In the mean time I put a 1tb drive in place of the 2 raid drives and turned off RAID mode in bios and switched to ACH. I completed a restore to my new drive and am unable to boot. It gets a BSOD shortly after the splash screen shows up and boots into startup recovery.

As a test, I added a second 1tb drive and re-enabled / built a RAID 0 array. The restore worked and booted properly.

Once I decide on a new SSD I want to go to a single drive to be able to use TRIM. My question is this, is there a way to do a restore on to a single drive without raid? I assume there is a driver issue that is causing the problem.

I am not opposed to a fresh Win 7 install, but don't want to fight an activation battle... (home premium upgrade 3 license pack).

Any ideas?

 

[DeaconFrost]

I believe you could shoehorn the install onto a single SSD, but I believe there are quite some hoops to go through to enable TRIM. You shouldn't have any real activation battles, and there are legit ways of doing a clean install with an upgrade disc, so I think I'd probably make a USB Flash Drive that's bootable and do a fresh install from there.

 

[Kagato]

I've never tried going from a RAID install to AHCI but would assume it would be similar to switching a pre-installed OS from IDE to AHCI which I've done several times without issue:


Taken from Microsoft's page (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976) - you'd need to boot into Windows on the RAID setup to make the registry change :

Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

I've seen some guides that note/suggest installing Intel's most recent IAStore driver set as well before rebooting and enabling AHCI in BIOS.

 

[Forceman]

RAID normally includes ACHI, so it usually isn't a problem going backwards - have you tried booting the single drive with RAID set in the BIOS? It'll still work that way, even though you aren't using RAID itself. Assuming you've tried a Safe Mode boot?