I just set up a mirrored RAID array to replace my smaller single drive
setup.  I tried Norton's Ghost and Powerquest's DriveCopy, but neither
of them could migrate all of my data (and startup capabilities). 
(They don't like the mirrored RAID array.)  How can I do this?  It
seems like the mirrored set up is a high-level thing (i.e. done by
Windows).

Hi amsmith-ga,

Firstly, congratulations on choosing to go RAID. In an era where we
seem to accumulate data at an ever-growing rate, we don't seem to
value that data enough to keep it safe. RAID 1 (mirroring) is one of
the simplest and most efficient ways of doing so.

I'm assuming from your question that you have created your RAID array
within Windows, probably using Computer Management in Windows 2000 or
Windows XP. However this is only one of two ways to do it, and it's
the cheapest rather than the most efficient.

Software RAID is something that your operating system (such as
Microsoft Windows) does. Every time that your system needs to write to
your hard drive, which is pretty much all the time that it's in use,
Windows tells it to write to the mirrored hard drive as well. This
takes up some system resources in the process. There are also points
at which things can go wrong, as you're experiencing at present.

The alternative is hardware RAID. To do things this way, you would
need to buy an addin card that handles all the RAID work itself, thus
freeing up your system from having to do so. The system drives on all
my main machines are mirrored in hardware, using Adaptec 1200A cards,
which are very good indeed and cheap to boot.

After fitting the card and connecting the cables, all that needs to be
done is to tell the card to create the array. This is done within a
little utility that you can access as your machine is booting up, and
you can choose between creating a fresh blank array or duplicating the
data on one to the other. There are no options, no settings, no
messing around. It just does it. After that everything is entirely
transparent. Windows won't even see the other drive and the card will
ensure that everything written to the one drive will also be written
to the other.

I would recommend following this route if at all possible.

I hope that helps.

poe-ga
Google Answers Researcher

That's interesting.  I was under the impression that I was using
hardware RAID, since I bought a RAID card.  It is a Promise SATA150
TX2plus; do you know if that supports hardware RAID?  I did create the
volume via CM in W2k.  I tried to find a BIOS screen I could get to
the RAID through, but it seems to only POST (i.e. I can't get into a
menu).  I have four questions:

1) Is this software or hardware RAID?  (i.e. using the Promise card)

2) If it is software, why even buy a "RAID card"?  Couldn't W2k do all
of the work over a normal IDE channel?

3) Regardless of what RAID type I'm using (s/w versus h/w), how can I
migrate my system over?  The answer to this is trivial if I can get
hardware RAID to work.

4) If I'm interested in buying a different card for hardware RAID, how
can I tell which cards support it?


Thanks!
Adam Smith

Go ahead and create the hard drive array.

if you have access to a Windows 98 boot disk then boot into it and
goto choose the option that loads the cd-rom.  it will more likely
load the DOS driver for that RAID controller.  In dos you would then
run DOS version of Ghost and using a drive to drive copy move the
data.    You will not be booting into but sticking in the disk after
the win98 boot disks run.... You should be able to make a Ghost book
disk from the Windows version of ghost.
  
This works because in DOS most programs only see a drive not a RAID drive.

http://www.24by7.ca/files/boot98se.exe
if you need the boot disk here it is.

don't create the Raid Drive with the hard drive that contains the data
though.  You should have at least 3 drives.  I would create the RAID
drive with only the two blank drives in first and then after it's
create plug in the 3rd drive.  It's too easy to erase the wrong drive.