Windows 7: System Image Recovery

Ah, ok. Sorry about that.

In that case, it makes no difference. The RAID 0 will be treated the same as any other hard drive that was included in the image, and can also be restored to any hard drive that is large enough for it.

Thank you very much Brink,

That is all I needed to know..Was worried about restoring the raid as I had problems with Acronis years ago..Not detecting the raid volume..

Again sorry about steering you in the wrong direction...

Ron

You're most welcome. Don't worry about it. It gave me a chance to update the tutorial.

I rebuilt my computer with a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. I had created a system image onto an external hard drive. I installed the new hardware with the old HDD, configured in the same way (2x 1tb striped together, giving a usable vol of about 1.8 tb). When I start the restore (step 12), it errors out saying that my drive is too small. I've read that the image needs to be restored to a volume of equal or greater size than the volume that was imaged. I figured that it would work for me because I'm trying restore the image to EXACTLY the same drives configured in exactly the same way as before. The only difference now being the motherboard/cpu/RAM, which are about 5 years newer than what I had before. Here are the things I have tried, cleaning/formatting the drives in between, and which didn't work:

1. Open up diskpart in the command prompt and clean the drives, restripe them, format to ntfs and assign a name and drive letter and make active. Make the new drive as top boot priority, or second to the dvd in BIOS.
2. Use the motherboard RAID utility to stripe the drives, use diskpart and BIOS to do the appropriate steps in #1
3. Same as 2, except without doing any of the diskpart steps. This led to different errors, as one could imagine
4. Span the drives with a 500gb drive to make a larger volume using diskpart, creating the partition, making active, BIOS priority, etc
5. Create a stripe with the motherboard RAID utility and spanning that volume (2tb) with the 500gb in diskpart (the utility doesn't do spanning, probably because spanning isn't a great way to use multiple hard drives), then formatting and assigning a drive letter, etc.

These are the basic variations. Even when I created a larger volume and the computer finds it, (I verified that the computer is finding the new volume by looking for drivers to install to see if the volume shows up under My Computer, which it does), it still won't restore.

What am I missing? Is it the new hardware? Can I get around having to do a clean install?

Here are some guidelines
Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer
Frankly I would not bother. I'd definitely do a clean install deactivating programs like Photoshop before a clean install. MS will take care of most of the basic drivers but for graphics drivers I'd download from the manufacturer's website (eg.Nvidia). I think you are starting clean and less likely to have follow on problems. For Windows 7 of course do an SP1 install. Unless you have a multi use retail OS package it can only be installed on one PC. Retail OSs can be transferred.
OEM OS's can't be legally transferred between motherboards.