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On-board Intel RAID1: Disk or Partition?

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I have a system with RAID1 connected via onboard Intel controller. I know that offline sector imaging programs won't work for this because they cannot see the logical RAID volume, so I purchased Acronis to be able to image from within Windows. I am not clear on the best method to create image: Disk or Partition? I lean towards Disk because it then shows the raid volume, whereas if I select Partition it shows the hard drive.

Any help greatly appreciated.

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I'm assuming you have a RAID1 for your boot drive and you are using Win7, if so you want to BU the disk. Win7 (as well as Vista) creates two partitions on your disk, one is for the OS and the other is for you. If you restore you need both. With the RAID1 if one drive fails then you just need to install a new drive and let windows manage the recovery, this is MUCH easier than using TI to do your recovery. Because you did not provide any details I'm making a lot of assumptions.

BTW to be 100% safe (assuming this is possible) make sure you actually go through a test recovery, remove your current drives, install two new drives and use TI to recover to the two new drives. If it fails reinstall your old drives. You don't want to discover you have a recovery issue in a moment of drive failure.

Thank you. Yes, RAID1 is the boot drive (its logical volume is the only partition on the system), but it is on Windows XP, not 7. I want a restorable image since the OS installation is OEM with no installation CD. True Image was purchased for this machine for situations such as corruption of OS, difficult to remove malware, and electrical storm damage that takes out both drives -- situations that RAID1 redundancy would not help in.

When I set up the backup, I am given the option to backup "Disk" (in which case it shows my RAID volume as the device to be backed up) or "Partition" (in which chase it shows the physical drive name as the devices to be backed up). I am unclear on which option to choose. Sometimes what seems obvious is not...;)