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a question for acronis true image home 2011

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hello to all this is my first post and i have a question
i want to use the acronis true image home 2011 with plus pack and media pack installed
to do the following
first to take a complete image of my disk to an external disk
then i want to use two exact same disks to create a raid 1 from the ability my motherboard gives me ( software raid with no extra hardware added )
and finally to put back my image to the raid 1 setup i will have create

my configuration now is
motherboard ecs x58b-a
2 wd hard disks 500 gb each (the ones i will use to create raid 1) one of them holds my system now
i have the following setup on my working hard drive
1) 130 gb partition with win xp home sp3
2) 130 gb partition with win 7 pro 64 bit
and finally a 211 gb partition free as a storage place

i know that maybe i will have to say good bye to my xp home partition cause i think it does not support a raid configuration of any kind
are all of the above possible?
please help me i want to avoid passing all that data and software from the begin and of course to avoid above all to make a brick of my pc

thank you for any help you can give me

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According to http://kb.acronis.com/content/6533 , you will not be able to achieve what you want if you use a software RAID. A software RAID is what you setup if you use Windows 7 Disk management to set it up (stripe/mirror). The reason you cannot do it with Acronis is that if you backup your basic disk, format your disks as RAID, this will be a dynamic volume. If you restore a basic disk to a dynamic volume you will get a basic disk per the knowledge base article, and this will break your RAID set up.

You are right that Windows XP would not support dynamic disks.

Your best chance is to set up your RAID through your BIOS, if your motherboard includes a hardware RAID controller. Then you can use ATI and the universal restore feature to insert the RAID drivers into the restore process. This should/might work.

If I were you, I would reinstall Windows 7 and my apps.

Also, as a side note, I don't understand why you want to set up a RAID 1 volume, since you have ATI to restore your system. I would understand you'd want a RAID 0 system to improve performance. Unless your system availability is time critical, a RAID 1 will not get your much.

RAID 1 protects against various wonks that can occur -- some hardware and some software. Letting a RAID manager repair a hdisk using the mirror copy is sometimes easier (even automatic) than doing a full restore with ATI. The same holds for a hdisk critical failure, whereby you need to replace one of the hdisks -- letting the RAID manager build the disk is sometimes easier than going through an ATI restore. E.g., with my intel RAID, if I replace one of the hdisks, when I boot up the RAID manager notes that one of the members is not correct and asks if I want to fix it, one click and it fixes the disk.

RAID 0 can give some improvement in disk access but doubles the odds of a hardware problem affecting your logical disk. Personally, I'd rather by faster disks than use RAID 0 but it's all mostly amatter of personal preference.

Similarly, some folks turn of Windows restore because and ati restore can be used as a substitute. However, in certain cases a windows restore is faster and easier than an ATI restore -- e.g., if you install a prog and it makes things wonky, a win restore (assuming you created a restore point before installing the errant program), is, imo, faster and easier than restoring every file on the disk/partition.

first i want to thank you both for your answers
pat i think that scott covered me with his answer in the, why to use raid 1 if you have the ati software and secondly i prefer to have two protections than one or none. I have had some very ugly experiences over the past with hardware failure and losing a lot of work and data that some i never recovered and was lost for ever since they were 5-6 years old and no longer available to reposes from companies that had stop existing

now to my last question that will make me determined what to do
with true image home 2011 can i take a clone of my present disc and then set it up on a raid 1 does it support restoring to a raid
the raid will be created with the use of my bios raid controller (Intel)

pat i have seen what you wrote above:

Your best chance is to set up your RAID through your BIOS, if your motherboard includes a hardware RAID controller. Then you can use ATI and the universal restore feature to insert the RAID drivers into the restore process. This should/might work.

but the part that says: This should/might work.

doesn't make me feel very confident as to what i should do as you can understand i need to be quite sure as to what i am doing

A hardware RAID should basically be a black box as far as any software is concerned. If you have a raid controller thorugh your chipset (hardware RAID), then it's likely ati will work.

However, not all software, inlcuding ati, will work with all the possible diff hardware setups. The thing to do would be to install ati (you can get a free trial) and make a bootcd and use it as if you were going to do a restore, going through all the steps up to the final proceed. this will show you if ati can recognize all your hard disks including the RAID disk.

Thre's no other way to guarantee that a program, ati or any other disk imaging program, can handle your hardware.

ok scott
thanks i will give it a try and see what will happen
thanks for the help

Not only, to Scott H's point, you are never sure any imaging software and its recovery device will work on your hardware, but the Universal Restore feature is a complex process where ATI updates the registry during the restore to slip in the right drivers. So "updating the registry" and "right drivers" are not easy things to do rigorously right (once again hardware identification and driver dependencies).
Regardless of how it will actually perform, it might still be the best alternative to a full fresh install.