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Rebuilding Raid 0 config

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hello,

I have  a 3 - 200gig  5400 rpm hard drives in  raid 0 configuration on my laptop. everything is working fine and i am wanting to replace all my hardrives with 3- 320gig 7200rpm drives and rebuild a new raid 0 config. Looking thru all the postings i am unable to find a clear set of procedures to make this go smooth. Any suggestions?

cheers,

Aaron

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The basic instructions would be the following:

  1. Boot to the Acronis CD and create an Entire Disk Image of the current RAID setup. Save this to a USB drive or other external drive.
  2. Remove the current drives and replace them with the new ones.
  3. Enter the BIOS as necessary and setup the new drives into a RAID 0 configuration.
  4. Boot to the Acronis CD and restore the image to the new RAID setup. Note that you will probably want to restore the partition(s) with resize unless you want to use the unallocated space for a new partition. If you restore individual partitions, you will probably also want to restore the MBR.

Before you begin this, boot to the Acronis CD and make sure that all your drives can be seen. This includes the RAID drive and the backup drive. Also make sure that the backup image can be validated successfully from the Acronis CD.

Some RAID drives can be removed and reinstalled and retain their setup and data. Because of this, I usually label or mark the drives so I can reinstall them to the same ports, if necessary. Also keep track of the current order in which the drives are added to the RAID 0 array. As far as I know, both of these things need to be the same for this to work if you reinstall the original drives.

Just what I needed. Would this procedure apply if the replacement drives for RAID 0 where not the same as the originals. Presumably there was a drive failure, the exact original drives could not be found, so upgraded replacement drives were installed. Your procedure for reinstalling the Entire Image onto the new RAID 0 was followed and then Windows would be able to boot up from C partition even though the drivers for the hard disks no longer matched. Is this what I could expect ?

You are in a dange zone here from the word go. Raid 0 has no fault tolerance at all. It one drive should fail your entire 3-drive array would be shot. There is no parity, striping or anything else to rebuild from should one drive fail. Raid 0 was designed for speed and speed alone. Just make sure you get good full-image backups once in a while. It is the only way you will be able to restore a Raid 0. Replace the failed drive(s) and put the last full-image backup back on.

Hello Superdoug3,

Thank you for posting your question. I will be happy to assist you.

If you have not changed your RAID controller or changed the hard drive with a new interface, I see no problem in doing what you want to do.

If you can let know more about your new hardware, I am confident we can give you a more definite answer.

Otherwise, if you have a brand RAID controller, you may want to take a look at this article, it talks about what you can do in such situations.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

thank you, the article seems to be what I needed. I do not have RAID 0 installed, I am just being proactive by considering the problems that I could encounter. I am using ATI2009, does this mean I need to purchase a Acronis 2009 Plus Pack and install this into ATI2009 then create a bootable CD from this.

thank you Jim. I do weekly and daily backups with Acronis all of the time. Anton has indicated that I am safe as long as I purchase ATI2009 Plus Pack to restore backup image using different drivers for the hard drives. Obviously from your warning I need to do some testing before committing to RAID 0. I have MSI X58 Pro chip set which has RAID controllers built in. It seems that I should consider RAID10 also, as I can just replace a failed hard drive with another of equal or higher capacity.
3 options
1. Install RAID0, purchase ATI2009 Plus Pack, do image backups
2. Install RAID 10, use the MSI recovery utilities to recover from the mirror array.
3. stay away from RAID array all together.

One other questino Anton.
MSI X58 Pro manual states that I must intall RAID before installing Vista. Would a full image backup (not sector by sector)
then install my MB software (i.e. wipe out my C-drive) and set BIOS to use RAID 5 or RAID 10 then manage/restore from my full image backup be a viable way to implement RAID to an existing system. I understand Windows Vista partitions differently with RAID activated in BIOS, so maybe I need to start from scratch with installing Windows and all other software.