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Can I Restore a Disk Image to a Smaller Partition?

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Hi forum:
I have a Dell desktop with a 1TB RAID 0 (hardware) arrangement across two 500GB drives.
I plan to convert this to a 500GB RAID 1 (hardware) mirrored arrangement.
Can I use ATI Home to backup the current drives and restore to the new mirrored one, and, if so, what general procedure should I use?
Many thanks,
Donal

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Yes, in general you can, provided that the amount of data on the 1TB is smaller than the 500GB capacity.

Why are you moving to a RAID1 system, may I ask? Is this a home computer or a production computer that has professional or industrial uptime requirements?

From what I've seen, the RAID drivers for most desktops are the same regardless of the level selected -- RAID 0 uses the same driver as RAID 1, RAID 5, etc. There shouldn't be any issues and UR shouldn't be needed.

Just create an normal Entire Disk Image backup (the whole drive) and then restore that to the new RAID 1 setup (will probably need to resize the partitions). The procedure isn't really any different than when single drives are used.

Thanks to you both Pat L and MudCrab.

I've changed from RAID 0 to RAID 1 before on a similar machine, using reinstall, and had no driver issues. I did it then because of a hard drive fail, and to reduce/ avoid the need for backups -- and it has worked out great, especially as I had another drive fail and simply swapped for automatic rebuild. I have a lot of funky software and projects, and it's been a great solution for me.

MudCrab
Can you clarify what you mean by resizing the partition. I'm starting with a single 1TB partition and moving to a single 500TB one. When I did something similar on the other machine I didn't have to specify the partition in BIOS. Are you referring to something I need to do within ATI when I restore the image?

Donal

I stand corrected and have edited my post for future readers.

Yes, when you restore your image on the RAID1, you would boot on the recovery CD and, as you restore:

- if you select the entire disk (partition(s) and MBR+track0, ATI will scale the size of the partitions to fit the smaller space,
- if you select each partition at a time, you will be able to resize them as desired. Choose this method if you have a system reserved partition, or other OEM/Diag/Recovery partition (don't resize those). This method will also allow you to set the proper offset before the first partition if you want to align your partitions to your RAID settings. You just need to mark the right partition active, and finally restore the MBR+track0 and disk signature.