OK thanks Gregrocker, I'll do it later and let you know the outcome. Would have preferred to keep the System Reserved but it seems to have caused more issues. Why MS didn't just make it 200mb in the first place is a mystery?
Would have saved people a lot of problems.
I've tried booting into the PWCD unfortunately my options are limited as it's not picking up my RAID 0 configuration. It shows it as two separate hard disks.
The only option I had was to do a surface test which found no errors.
Why are you using RAID0 for the OS drive? Win7 doesn't much like RAID. It offers no benefit that I know of and lots of problems in Win7.
I would unRAID and clean reinstall to only one HD with other unplugged.
When I got the pc from Dell it came set up as RAID so I just left it as it was.
Do you know of any imaging software than can migrate from Raid to Non-Raid without reinstalling everything?
We'll have to wait to hear from the imaging experts to know for sure. I believe I read recently where someone reimaged RAID to a single HD.
You could always get the superior Clean Reinstall Windows 7 Factory OEM without the preinstalled bloatware and useless factory utilities which have better versions built into Win7. This is often better than getting a new computer.
Are there any performance problems associated with this anomaly?
No, to be honest Greg its been working fine. The only thing it effects is when I go to create a system image and system reserved drive doesn't show up. If I then assign a drive letter and remove it again straight away the image works OK again.
What I might do is mark C as active, do he system repair 3 times, format system reserved area then recreate it. Then mark system reserved as active again and do startup repair again to recreate the system reserved partition. If after that the drive still is inaccessible I'll just delete it.
Been reading a few items that say you can use Windows system image backup to go from Raid 0 to non raid. But I'm going to leave that until I've got a bigger hard drive. At the moment I have 2 320gb drives but I want to buy a single 2tb drive in next few months.
You can also copy the bootmgr to C:\ Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD
I see no reason why you cannot make an image of a raid0 drive. Try free Macrium.
Wow thanks whs. Completely missed that feature in EasyBCD! Makes it a lot easier.
I can make the images ok but I can't read the Raid0 using the Partition Wizard disk. Just shows it as two separate drives.
Once I've bought the new single drive I'm going to delete the Raid array and just use one of the drives as extra internal storage.
Looks like a good plan. And if you want OS performance, get a 64GB SSD. That is a LOT better than Raid0 which really does not buy you much for the OS - different though for shoving large amounts of sequential data around. But the OS does not do that. It's performance if a function of the access time to the disk. And it is hard to beat the 0.1ms average access time to a SSD - spinning disks (Raid or not) are around 15ms.
I've been looking at SSD's. Could I use an SSD for Windows 7 and a 2TB Spinner for Data storage?
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