Another XP to W7 Install

[sornborger]

You guys must get tired of this. Anyway, if you still have some juice left I'd like some advise.

I just did a clean install of W7 on a fresh drive. Before doing so I unplugged my sata raid1 array with XP on it. I selected AHCI before the install. The install went without a hitch.

Now comes my question. What should I do with my RAID array? Should I just plug the 2 drives back in and hope the array doesn't get destroyed? Or do I just plug one drive in for now?

I'm just confused as to what to do at this point. I'd also like to salvage as much as I can from my old XP install.

 

[SimMike2]

I'm guessing Windows 7 will pick up the drive array just fine, provided they are connected exactly like they were before you unplugged them. Now booting to Windows XP, which was probably installed with IDE emulation, that is another story. There are ways to enable AHCI after the fact with Windows XP, but you need to boot into XP first.

I suggest you unplug your Windows 7 drive and plug in your array drives. Now set your BIOS to IDE emulation, or whatever it was when you installed and ran XP. If this works, do research with google on how to enable AHCI after the fact. Try booting to your XP array with AHCI enabled. If this works, plug in your Windows 7 drive and toggle between each operating system using BIOS boot preference during startup.

So you didn't make an image file or backup your files on the XP drive?

 

[sornborger]

I'm guessing Windows 7 will pick up the drive array just fine, provided they are connected exactly like they were before you unplugged them. Now booting to Windows XP, which was probably installed with IDE emulation, that is another story. There are ways to enable AHCI after the fact with Windows XP, but you need to boot into XP first.

I suggest you unplug your Windows 7 drive and plug in your array drives. Now set your BIOS to IDE emulation, or whatever it was when you installed and ran XP. If this works, do research with google on how to enable AHCI after the fact. Try booting to your XP array with AHCI enabled. If this works, plug in your Windows 7 drive and toggle between each operating system using BIOS boot preference during startup.

So you didn't make an image file or backup your files on the XP drive?

Whew, hope I can answer all of that. I originally had one IDE drive and later converted to RAID. My MB has built in Intel RAID. I was able to clone my IDE into the RAID array. Wasn't easy.

Right now I'm back on the XP RAID setup. The W7 hard drive is sitting next to me as I type this.

What I don't understand is I have AHCI set in BIOS for the W7 install. So how would W7 detect my RAID array if I plug them in and boot into W7? Is W7 that intuitive?

I do have an image of XP setup on a separate partition in the RAID array.

 

[sornborger]

I guess at this point I could Clonezilla my XP onto another drive, verify the clone and then from there I could set BIOS to AHCI, put W7 on port 0, the RAID array on ports 1 and 2, boot up and see what happens.

Unless someone else has a better suggestion that would save me a ton of work.

 

[sornborger]

Well W7 doesn't like the RAID array. My thinking now is to do another Win 7 clean install, but this time select RAID, not AHCI. I'll do the F6 floppy thing I guess if it gives me the chance to get the RAID drivers installed.

 

[sornborger]

Gee my very own thread. Here's the latest:

I did another clean install and F-Sixed the RAID drivers into Win 7. The install went fine. The funny thing is Win 7 takes my 2 RAID 1 drives and treats them as a RAID array. Perfect. Win 7 is on a separate RAID drive that isn't part of the array.

Now when I boot into XP on the RAID array XP finds my new Win 7 drive and happily installs the driver for the hard drive. It then requests a reboot to make the changes permanent. When I reboot I BSOD. The only way around it is to Boot into Last Known Good Configuration. From there I just disable the new drive while inside XP.

The only thing I can think might be the problem is my XP install is x32 and the new Win 7 is x64.

At any rate I can work around this annoyance. I now have the basic setup that I want. I'll eventually take the Win 7 platter drive out and clone to a SSD. But in the meantime I'll get everything working over a period of time.

Funny no one else has run into this problem before me. I searched Anandtech and couldn't find a thing on my specific problem.

 

[sornborger]

I now can boot either way without issue. So its not a 32/64 bit problem. My guess now is that both OS's had to get the RAID array to zero errors. I had to rebuild my array in XP a couple of times.

Intel RST initially showed 512 errors, both in Seven and XP. But after a rebuild in XP it dropped to 2. One more rebuild got everything to zero.

Now my system boots automatically into W7. I use F11 to get into my boot menu on restart to go to XP.

I've got all bookmarks, emails, address book migrated. I DUMPED MS Outlook 2007 and switched to Mozilla Thunderbird on the XP machine during this swith to W7. Since there is a neat free utility to migrate Mozilla products from one computer to another it was a piece of cake. BTW, Thunderbird is FAST.

Seems strange to me to be in W7 now and not XP writing in the forum.

I tried XP Mode. Don't bother with that if you're migrating. It is what it is, whatever that is. I think from here I'll use Virtual PC to try out Debian.

I do like Windows 7 x64. It's very powerful and seems to utilize resources efficiently. In fact watching the resource meters can be entertaining by themselves. I going to be converting over some x86 machines and I'm sure they'll run better too.