A drive imaging program that actually works with RAID?

[crsgardner]

If I had known how difficult this was ahead of time I'd never have explored it.

I have a K8V SE Deluxe motherboard with 2 HDs in a 2x0 array on the Promise controller. Fairly common setup for Anandtech fans. The board is great. I'm at a point where I want to "clean the cruft" in Windows so to speak, so I want to reformat the array, reinstall Windows, get drivers and basic apps on, and image it.

In the past on "regular" (non-RAID) setups, Ghost would do this just fine. However, Ghost 2003 doesnot recognize the drive when I booted with it (doesn't surprise me: I don't know of any Promise 378 drivers for DOS). I bought Norton Ghost 9, which is essentially PowerQuest's DriveImage, and tried to boot from that. In thatcase, I was able to hit F6 during boot and specify RAID drivers. Ghost 9 (oddly) said the drivers were already in place (odd, considering Ghost 9 officially doesn't support RAID). When I got into the environment, the array was undetectable. I tried both the drivers "already on the CD" and my own on a floppy which I KNOW work during the Windows XP install, and the array is never viewable.

I also tried Acronis TrueImage 8. This is still up in the air, as the boot environment freezes. I've been told the latest build of the program has proper support for my RAID controller, but it isn't actually available from their site. You have to request it from tech support.

Has anyone been able to find a decent drive imaging program that actually works with RAID? Plenty can read the RAID from within Windows, but I've found none that can see it with their boot disks. This is vital, as I want a system where, if something gets screwed up, I can drop a CD in at boot and bring it back to my default (just like my old system under Ghost).

 

[phisrow]

I don't know much about this, so this is only a question(if anyone knows better please correct me); but it seems that you might, possibly, be able to just ignore the raid for ghosting purposes. I know that most imaging programs can do a sector by sector copy of any filesystem or disk contents that they don't understand, so could one not simply de-link the raided drives(without removing the striped data), image the striped data, and then re-link the drives? This isn't dreadfully convenient, certainly; but it strikes me that it might be possible to just break, create images for both, rebuild and then break, image, and rebuild whenever you need to restore in the future. Am I missing something serious here?

 

[Scott66]

I use Ghost 2003 and have no problems with it seeing my raid 0 consisting of 2 raptors. I constantly ghost my entire "drive" with 2 partitions c,d and have restored from my ghost image. Use A7N8X with SiL sata controller.

 

[crsgardner]

Do you have DOS drivers for your card? Mine requires drivers for OSs to see it, and Windows 2000/XP are the only drivers offered, it seems.

Anyone else have experience with this?

 

[imported_Phil]

This is not a Highly Technical topic.

Quoted from the sticky post, i.e. the Rules:

Questions regarding troubleshooting, technical support, and product advice belong in other appropriate forums such as General Hardware, Networking, Video, etc. They have more traffic and, they are visited by knowledgable, enthusiastic members eager to share good advice and help troubleshoot problems.

 

[crsgardner]

It IS a highly technical topic, as the same question in the general forums have netted answers like "I didn't know Ghost uses DOS drivers" and "If you have a RAID 0, you don't need backups". I personally don't consider questions such as "What's the end of the universe like?" as "highly technical". I'm asking if someone knows a way to get the PE boot environment to properly recognize Win2K/XP fasttrak.sys driver. If that isn't highly technical, I don't know what is.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: crsgardner
It IS a highly technical topic, as the same question in the general forums have netted answers like "I didn't know Ghost uses DOS drivers" and "If you have a RAID 0, you don't need backups". I personally don't consider questions such as "What's the end of the universe like?" as "highly technical". I'm asking if someone knows a way to get the PE boot environment to properly recognize Win2K/XP fasttrak.sys driver. If that isn't highly technical, I don't know what is.

It's General Hardware as it's a troubleshooting question. Getting a driver to work so you can ghost all your pr0n back to a RAID array is not highly technical. If you consider it highly technical, then I suggest you stop playing with computers and go back to Lego.

 

[crsgardner]

Originally posted by: Dopefiend

Originally posted by: crsgardner
It IS a highly technical topic, as the same question in the general forums have netted answers like "I didn't know Ghost uses DOS drivers" and "If you have a RAID 0, you don't need backups". I personally don't consider questions such as "What's the end of the universe like?" as "highly technical". I'm asking if someone knows a way to get the PE boot environment to properly recognize Win2K/XP fasttrak.sys driver. If that isn't highly technical, I don't know what is.

It's General Hardware as it's a troubleshooting question. Getting a driver to work so you can ghost all your pr0n back to a RAID array is not highly technical. If you consider it highly technical, then I suggest you stop playing with computers and go back to Lego.

It's a server. It houses the data for my company, not porn. I don't consider questions about space travel "highly technical" any more than questions about a driver not running in a WinPE. Most of the "highly technical" questions on this board are largely philosophical anyway.

I've asked the question on the general boards here and more technical boards at storagereview.net. No one has an answer. That leads me to believe the question is "technical enough" to post here. If you want to troll, go somewhere else.

 

[crsgardner]

By the way, the forum description also says to "leave your ego at the door". Why don't you do that, "dopefiend", instead of being an ass?

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: crsgardner
By the way, the forum description also says to "leave your ego at the door". Why don't you do that, "dopefiend", instead of being an ass?

My ego's not in question here, "crsgardner". If you really and truly believe that this is a Highly Technical question, then I pity you.

Here is a solution, however.

Make a BartPE CD, and apply the Fasttrack driver. Install Ghost 2003 into that environment, boot from CD. Problem solved.


Or, you could break the array, Ghost the drive in DOS like normal, and then rebuild the array in the controller's BIOS.


Lastly, Powerquest's Drive Image will allow you to make a hot backup of a drive, from within Windows.

[Edit] I see that you also considered this important enough to cross-post it as well. Congratulations, newbie.

 

[crsgardner]

Make a BartPE CD, and apply the Fasttrack driver. Install Ghost 2003 into that environment, boot from CD. Problem solved.

How is this any different from using the existing WinPE environment that comes with Ghost 9? In that case, I boot, load up the drivers, and the array is still undetected. I would assume it'd be identical using BartPE.

Or, you could break the array, Ghost the drive in DOS like normal, and then rebuild the array in the controller's BIOS.

There are no available DOS drivers, so this wouldn't work.

Lastly, Powerquest's Drive Image will allow you to make a hot backup of a drive, from within Windows.

Ghost 9 IS DriveImage. PowerQuest doesn't exist anymore. Symantec bought them out over a year ago. Yes, you can make a hot backup, but you still need to boot into the recovery environment to restore.

I see that you also considered this important enough to cross-post it as well. Congratulations, newbie.

As I mentioned earlier, the responses I got from the general forum weren't encouraging. I figured I'd ask the "highly techical" people.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: crsgardner

Or, you could break the array, Ghost the drive in DOS like normal, and then rebuild the array in the controller's BIOS.

There are no available DOS drivers, so this wouldn't work.

Attach one of the drives to the standard IDE controller and run Ghost again. Voila, the drive is recognised.

I see that you also considered this important enough to cross-post it as well. Congratulations, newbie.

As I mentioned earlier, the responses I got from the general forum weren't encouraging. I figured I'd ask the "highly techical" people.

[/quote]

The reponses you are getting here are exactly the same as you'd get if you'd left it for more than five hours.

 

[crsgardner]

You know, I just read your blog. I hate to say this, but you're the reason why people hate guys like us so much. It's technical support, not technical act like a dick.

The "do you have Office" rant was particularly intriguing. You "can't even talk to" a person who has pirated office? Is there some kind of federal law that I'm not aware of?

This makes me wonder why you're hanging out on boards like this at all. Surely all of us are nowhere near your level of technical ability. We bow to the great god, tech-ass. Perhaps some basic people skills are needed on your part...

 

[imported_Phil]

.

 

[olds]

Wrong Forum