sorry another raid 1 question

monday i have to install a raid card and second harddrive in a friends pc. currently the os and all files are installed on a single harddrive on one os the motherboard ide channel.

what i plan to do is unplug the current harddrive from the motherboard plug it and the new drive into the controller card(that i will install) and then create a mirrored array....

er.. are there chances of complications? will booting to the oeprating system after the install give me any gyp(since no raid drievrs are currently installed and os is obviously now connected to the controlelr card)?? does it take long for the controller cards setup prog to mirror the drive( currently about 2gig on a 60 gig drive) does the new harddrive have to be formatted first?

second hard drive should be unformated. If it's windows 2000/XP, look at reinstalling, otherwise, you may be able to get away with it. As for "copying" the old to tne new, i would be VERY carefull, and alway, always back up everything before you start.

Many IDE raid controllers give you the option to mirror one drive to the other in the raid creation process. You may be able to mirror the existing drive to the new one as you create the array. Some controllers require creating a mirror from scratch. You won't know which way yours works until you try it or, hit the website for your your mobo or raid controller manufacturer.

If you have any doubt, backup the drive first.

As far as booting, again you'll have to try it. Since your OS install was using and IDE controller to boot with initally, you may get a "boot drive not found" or other error when trying to boot the old OS from the new controller. If this happens you can boot from an XP cd to the repair console and edit the boot.ini and bootdd.sys to allow for the change. That still doesn't mean that you won't get a blue screen if windows doesn't like the driver but it's worth a shot.

More on boot.ini changes with the recovery console here.

ive had a thougt.. firstly i'll install the controller card(no drives attached) and boot to windows(original drive still attached to motherboard) from there i could install the controller drivers.

then after shutting down:) install the 2 drives to the controller, mirror the original (adaptec site info tells me that the cards bios utility will enable me to create and duplicate an existing card without losing data on the original).. and then boot as normal.. since windows now has drivers for the controlelr card it should then theoretically load???


yes/no/maybe ?

ps(os IS windows xp and controller card is an adaptec 1200, 2 channel raid)

Sounds like a great plan. I'd try attaching the drive to the raid controller and booting before mirroring though. If it'll boot from the controller card before you mirror it'll boot there afterwards.

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Originally Posted by dr_jones

ive had a thougt.. firstly i'll install the controller card(no drives attached) and boot to windows(original drive still attached to motherboard) from there i could install the controller drivers.

then after shutting down:) install the 2 drives to the controller, mirror the original (adaptec site info tells me that the cards bios utility will enable me to create and duplicate an existing card without losing data on the original).. and then boot as normal.. since windows now has drivers for the controlelr card it should then theoretically load???


yes/no/maybe ?

ps(os IS windows xp and controller card is an adaptec 1200, 2 channel raid)

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maybe.

however, you'll still have to edit the boot.ini file

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Originally Posted by Matridom

maybe.

however, you'll still have to edit the boot.ini file

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Maybe. Depends on the order in which the boot order is set in BIOS. But be prepared and modify the boot.ini before, adding an entry for the controller. If there will be no other drive on the initial IDE controller the configuration shouldn't change. From what I've seen so far, in many (but not all) cases you lose all your data when you create the array. However install the drivers for the controller before attaching any drive to it. If you have a spare drive or enough CD-R's then ghost your current drive, this might save your a$$ later.

ive formated and reinstalel diwndow son this machine so many times now i wish id never seen it.. the guys got so much software on there and things .. opera(some 1920's accounting tool :) ), personal banking software whicvh needs reactivating by fax and none of the default embedded modem driver confugs work.. .. on and on it goes.

any way unfrotunately i don t have another spare ata drive(only serial ata and duds) .. but whould if possible liike an exact replica of the drive he has already with data intact just in case the worse thing happens... im gonnahave to borrow one...

havent seen the option to ghost a drive in xp only 2003 and have never use dthe option before... does it make an exact copy from one disk to another??

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Originally Posted by dr_jones

havent seen the option to ghost a drive in xp only 2003 and have never use dthe option before... does it make an exact copy from one disk to another??

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Use Symantec Ghost 2003 and do the ghosting after booting from floppy, not running from windowze!

looking at the boot.ini file on my pc here as i type. altering it for the machine in question wouldnt be such a problem if the microsoft help pages actually explained the various disk descriptors.

ie multi, disk, rdisk and partition ( in the boot.ini file the location of the os is defiend in terms of these)

what exactly do they refer to? how will they differ when the drive moves from one location to another ie from the primary motherboard channel to the controller