Replacing Boot Drive - Don't want to lose mirrored discs. How!

[Flasharino]

I gave up trying to install on the 2nd UEFI computer and went back to trying with the computer I want to use the drive in which is BIOS, not UEFI. Can I assume that you ignored my question about copying the files manually because you don't know the answer?

 

[gregrocker]

I don't know if it will work because I've not seen it tried or seen it tried.

Are you ignoring that bypassing UEFI to install normally always works?

 

[Flasharino]

Oh I see. You did a little tit-for-tat thing there. How lovely. As I said in my last message this is not a UEFI machine.

 

[gregrocker]

Sorry you confused me a bit there. Yes on an MBR install maybe copying the files into the partition can help, but it's more likely a bad installer. Start over with a new one from Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
and if DVD fails try the flash stick install.

 

[Flasharino]

I FINALLY got Windows to install on the SSD, on the proper computer with the BIO set to AHCI as everyone says it needs to be BUT - the 4 drives I was using as mirrored do not show up in the file manager. When I go into Computer Management - Disk Management all the drives appear that as "Dynamic - Foreign". I tried viewing them on another computer to see if I could back up the data there and the same thing happens. Now what??

 

[Flasharino]

I tried switching the BIOS to RAID but when I tried to boot, it blue-screened, as I figured it would. I then tried doing a re-install as Upgrade with the BIOS set to RAID, but I got the same old error. I then looked on the C: drive and found the setuperr.log file in the C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther directory. The contents of the file are show in the photo below.

 

[gregrocker]

You may need to initialize the drives as Dynamic again in Disk Mgmt.

Please tell me you heeded LMiller's clear advice to back up your data first, and that those backups are viable.

If not at this point I would not do anything besides recreating the old setup to back up the files. Anytime files are not backed up during a reinstall it is risky, but especially when you're on a high wire with Dynamic or RAID data disks which you don't know will re-initialize correctly.

At this point I would confirm the data backup is good or do an emergency rescue of your files by recreating the exact setup you had before with identical settings. There may be no way to retrieve your data otherwise.

 

[Flasharino]

To reiterate my initial post: "in the past when I have done things like this I have had to copy all my data to a third drive - either external USB or on another PC, then copy it back after re-setting up the drives the way I want them. And re-setting up meant formatting the drives. The process takes hours and hours and hours and I would prefer to not need to do that.

Is there a way to install Windows 7 x64 on a new drive, use it to boot but preserve the existing mirrored drives and their data?"

 

[gregrocker]

It's too risky to assure you one way or the other. Someone else might be able to, but as I said in the beginning we've only seen problems here with RAID or Dynamic drives since Win7 beta.

You've been given the ways to try doing it but they were under the implicit assumpting the data would be backed up. All bets are off whenever data is not backed up for a reinstall or repair.