Moving existing Windows 7 Pro 64Bit OS Install to RAID 5

Hi All,


Am pulling my hair out a bit.


I have the following MOBO:

ASUS P7P55D-E EVO

2X80gb Western Digital SATA Drives

2x2TB Samsung Spintpoint SATA Drives

I have already been using the machine with another 80Gb Western Digital SATA Drive with Windows 7 Pro 64Bit installed and now want to convert to RAID 5 for redunancy in case of Drive failure (We all say we will back up but we are all lazy when it comes to it LOL).

I have taken out the original OS drive and plugged it into the E-SATA connector on the MOBO, gone into the BIOS, turned on RAID for the SATA Ports on the MOBO, and connected the 2 X 80Gb Boot drives. Entered the Hardware RAID Controller POST, and created the RAID 5 Volume from the 2 X 80Gb Discs.


Now boot with Acronis Wester Digital edition.

Clone the Original 80Gb Disc to the new Raid Array.

Shut machine off, remove original OS 80gb Disc from E-SATA port.

Boot machine.

It starts to boot, and gets as far as the Windwos 7 Microsoft 4 Colour logo and then I get an error and then have to boot into Windows 7 from DVD and go through the repair process.

When the Repair has run it reports the following:


The following startup option will be repaired:
Name: Windows Boot Manager
Identifier: {9DEA862C-5CDD-4E70-ACC1-F32B344D4795}

The following startup options will be added:
Name: Windows Recovery Environment (recovered)
Path: Recovery\e52d0bc2-1f15-11df-af10-d764fe3715b8\Winre.wim
Windows Device: Partition=D76190 MB)

A copy of the current boot configuration data will be saved as:C:\Boot\BCD.Backup.0001

However it fails to do the update

How do I get this RAID to boot successfully? I *don't* want to have to re-install the Operating System as that is just too painful a thought


--Roger

It may not be possible to clone a single HD installation to a RAID5 array.

The stall you are getting at the boot animation is typical of the failure of an image or HD to start on new hardware as is often the case.

The known solutions to this besides clean install are booting Paragon Adaptive Restore CD which removes all drivers to adjust the install to boot on new hardware, or use Acronis 10+ with Universal Restore which accomplishes the same thing during imaging.

However the wild card is the RAID5 which while seen as new hardware may not be adaptable without clean reinstall.

I would try to find a manual way to load the RAID drivers first. They may be in the Win7 DriverStore but a combination of conflicts are blocking startup, which is why the technology which supports this starts by removing all the key drivers.

I will ask the best imaging expert I know SIW2 to look at this.

What about if I wanted to Clone a Single Disk to a RAID 1 (Mirrored) Setup? Would that work?

The reason for a Mirrored RAID, is that in the event of system failure (MOBO), then at least I would be able to read the disk if I plugged it into an external Doc?

--Roger