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I'm extending my RAID 0 array. How to restore image?

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I've got two drives in my RAID 0 array at the moment, added another drive to the system. (2x 1TB --> 3x 1TB). I made a backup of the existing array onto an external hard drive. Now how do I restore the image once I rebuild the RAID 0 with the new drive?

 

I'm thinking use Windows PE Universal Restore media and the backup image I made after I rebuild the RAID 0 in the system's BIOS / Intel Storage Management. Is this the correct course of action?

 

Thank you.

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From reading some hits found on Google, it looks like you will need to use the Acronis bootable rescue media to restore your full disk backup image from your external hard drive once you have deleted and recreated your Raid 0 array in the system BIOS.

See Microsoft Forum post on the same subject

I would strongly suggest testing your bootable media prior to deleting the Raid 0 array to ensure that you can access both the Raid drive(s) and your external drive to perform the recovery.

See also http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/246711-32-raid-drive-existing-setup for another opinion on doing this.

You should not need to use universal restore at all.  WinPE is probably the way to go since you have RAID, but you want the Acronis Rescue Media and not the Universal Resstore Rescue Media.

When you goot to the rescue media you created with WinPE, hopefully it see's your RAID setup as a single drive.  Then you just restore the image to the drive and should be good to go.  

If for some reason, the WinPE does not see your new RAID as a single drive, you may need to go back and inject RAID controller drivers in your WinPE, but perhaps it won't be needed at all.

Thank you both for your help. I made a Windows PE / Acronis Plug-in Rescue Media USB. During creation of the rescue media, I downloaded the x64 Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) .INF drivers from Intel's support website and added them to the USB. I then booted from the USB and double-checked that it saw my existing 2-drive RAID 0 (which it did).

I restarted, broke my RAID stripe in the Intel Storage Manager during bootup, and created the 3-drive RAID 0 stripe. I selected my USB rescue media from the boot menu (F11 on my motherboard), and restored the image from my connected external hard drive to the new, empty RAID 0 array.

Everything worked after that (all programs, files, etc. are intact), the only things that were strange were I needed to extend my volume in Windows Disk Manager, and the hard drives were at 100% activity for a while. It showed my hard drive (the RAID array) as having the original 2-drive capacity, with 932GB "Unallocated Space." So when the restore happened, it did not resize the free space. Simply right-clicking on the ALLOCATED space on the drive and clicking "Extend Volume" worked. That should be the last of the setup that I need to do, I let the computer idle for a few hours to let the Intel RST software do any cleanups in the background. I'll run a hard drive benchmark this afternoon and see some results.

Thank you for the help!

Excellent!  Glad it all worked out.  There's a setting in the bootable recovery media to keep the drive the same as the original or let it extend it out on the fly.  As you already found though, if you don't extened it out during build, windows disk manaagement can do this too.