DescentBB

My brother in law is upgrading his PC.

He bought two, 500gb Drives and wants to set them up in RAID 1 (mirror).

We made an image of his machine, has anyone had success of creating an image (Single Drive) and Restoring that image to a RAID setup?

I have tried a couple of different ways (All using Acronis TrueImage software). But it either won't boot at all - says to insert system disk.. or it starts to load windows then reboots.

Running Windows 7 64bit.

Thanks Guys!

I am trying a different way right now - but just wondering if anyone has been able to do it or should we start fresh with a Win7 install then restore his data manually.

I've done it before using Acronis to a Raid-5 array. I do remember that I did a disk image, not a file based image. Acronis has a pdf that explains the procedure pretty well, and that's what I used to do it. You should use the Acronis bootable CD to do this, for both making the image and restoring. You may also need the raid drivers for your particular hardware installed. Contact Acronis and they will do this and provide an ISO for you. I have not had success making an image while in Windows.

Yeah I should say I used the bootable trueimage and created an image of the entire drive partition. Did not run it while in windows.

How did you do it exactly? Did you restore the image to a pc that already had the raid array configured? Did you need to use the raid drivers?

I contacted Acronis and gave them the system specs. In this case it was a Dell Server w/ a Perc raid controller. They made an ISO image and I used that. When I booted to the system with the new disks, I configured the Raid using the Perc BIOS level utility, then booted w/ the Acronis CD and copied the image back over. The image was going from a Raid-5 to Raid-5 so the only change was the size of the Array.

I had 3 partitions to copy over which I created using the Acronis Backup and Restore Utility before copying the disk images over.