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How do I migrate single HDD to bootable RAID 1...

K

keldog7

Senior member
This has provided me with considerable grief and frustrtation. ANY help is appreciated. Sorry if its a bit of a cross post, but for the past week, I'm not getting any traffic on the other forum.

I have Win2K Pro installed to a single (non-RAID) SATA HDD. I want to upgrade this to a RAID 1 array (mirroring), but without re-installing Windows.

Mother board is an Asus A8NSLI, with the HDDs attached to SATA ports 3 and 4.
Chipset drivers 6.66 are installed under Win2K, and SP4 has been applied.
I've tried creating the array and rebooting --> BSOD with "inaccessible boot device" (which I will henceforth call BSOD-IBD).

Recovery console installed, and will not boot either with array enabled (from HDD).
I managed to (re-)create a Windows 2000 install CD with SP4 slipstreamed into it - and it boots properly to the install/repair screens. Of course, I have to use F6 with nVidia driver disk (RAID and storgae controller drivers both loaded with F6) to get this far.

At this point, if I ask it to repair the install it *does* find the Win2K install on the correct disk...so I *KNOW* that this migration should be possible. Unfortunately, even when I instruct the installer to repair the previous installation, it will not then reboot from the array (same BSOD-IBD error).

I'm inclined to attempt to reboot from the CD, use F6 as before, and then go into the recovery console. From there, I should be able to tell the OS to load the RAID array drivers, and it will hopefully boot...

...but does anyone know exactly *which* drivers I should tell Windows to load? - The console will require the location and exact name of the file on the HDD (array).

Thx,
A
 
noone?

ok, how about just getting Win2K installed from scratch to this motherboard on a RAID 1 array? I can't even get that to go, because after recognizing and formatting the array, it CAN'T copy nvraid.sys (or any of the other files from the NVIDIA-created driver disk) the the installation. I even tried skipping them, and then doing it manually via the recovery console - same error.

Has *anybody* got Win2K installed to a bootable array on the A8NSLI??
-Adrian
 
I would like to get an answer to this also because I want to migrate from a 10GB to an 80GB drive without having to reinstall. Would the Seagate utility that comes with the hard drive be sufficient?

:sun:
 
1. The raid chipset should have configuration bios you can get to during boot up. After setting up the mirror be sure and change the boot device in the MB bios to the raid controller and not just the HD?s. It may not be present with the HD choices to boot from, but may be a separate/additional bios item.
2. or create a FULL backup, create the mirrored raid and restore the image onto the single meta device ( the new mirrored raid). Also don?t forget to change the boot device in the MB to the raid controller like above.
 
Try Ghost or CasperXP. The latter kicks arse and is the best $50 you will ever spend.

Good Luck 🙂

Dave
 
I don't know the options that onboard RAID chips have, but all the inexpensive SATA or IDE RAID cards are able to convert a single non-RAID drive into a RAID 1 array:

1) Install the RAID card into the PC.
2) Install the drivers for the card into Windows and reboot.
3) Hook the original drive to the RAID card, boot to the built-in RAID card BIOS, and configure it to boot from and read that original drive. (Just making sure here that everything is working before the next step.)
Note: The RAID card will show up as a hard drive in the BIOS and should be your boot device.
4) Attach the new, blank, hard drive to the RAID card as a second drive.
5) Boot to the RAID card BIOS and tell it to create a new RAID 1 array by copying the data from the original drive to the new, blank drive.

I've done this several times with HighPoint RocketRAID ATA cards with no problems at all.
 
OK, nobody take this the wrong way, but I don't think any of you have actually attempted this migration using the nVidia implementation of RAID on the A8N-SLI. Basically, it doens't work. Of course I have the driver disk, *and* I've slipstreamed SP4 into my Win2K. The RAID array is set up properly and recognized as a single drive - heck, it even formats the drive during the install...but once it starts trying to copy the RAID driver files to the new install, you get the good old "Cannot copy nvraid.sys" error...for every single file on the driver disk.

Before going for a full install, I tried another method which was *supposed* to work. Namely, I installed the latest 6.66 drivers under Win2K when it was still installed to a single HDD. I then rebooted, and went into the BIOS and set up a RAID 0 array (striping). Tried reboot, but with this setup, you get the BSOD (inaccessible boot device) early in the boot. *Supposedly*, once a striped array like this is booted, it is possible to use the nVidia software RAID tools to "morph" the array into RAID 1. Short story here is that it didn't work either. By carefully checking the file directories, the 6.66 driver installation DID NOT put all of the required files on the HDD (and I must have tried it 6 times...)

At this point, I'm going to slipstream the nvraid.sys (et al) file(s) into another Windows2K installation CD. Apparently, users of the DFI NF4 boards have managed to get it working this way. There's a package out there called "nlite" which apparently makes all this slipstreaming business a bit easier.

Comments are still welcome... Any more takers?
-Adrian
 
I have not done it on your config personally, but.... I have taken a single disk to a raid setup using CasperXP. Painless. If this is of little or no help to you sorry and good luck!!

Dave
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Comments are still welcome... Any more takers?
Click to expand...

This would be much simpler if you were running Linux =)
Click to expand...


🙂 ...I AM. ...95% of the work I do is on linux...SMP Mandriva 2006 to be precise-its on 4 of my machines. Unfortunately, one of the rigs in my office requires Windows because some of my billing software will only run under Windows (I can't trust Cedega with my billing, I'm afraid...). Incidentally, how do you get "lifer" as your rating??

BUT, to everyone else, I successfully installed Win2K to a RAID 1 array last night. Although I finally had enough info (and trial & errors) to do it manually (with slipstream of SP4 and then slipstream of nVidia drivers), in the end I used the NLITE package.
For anyone contemplating it, the nlite thing is *very, very slick*. It also got me around the odd requirement of only being able to burn a working Win2K .iso with CDRWin. Nlite creates an .iso file, which I burned flawlessly with k3b. Install was painless - just remember not to hit F6, or you'll get some time-consuming errors, but it will still install.
Once installed, I installed the nVidia RAID tools, and PRESTO...RAID 1.

Cheers,
Adrian
 
Nothinman:
Lol...I just noticed your total posts...I had previously misread it as 1400 or so... But what's an order of magnitude eh? I don't think I'll reach "lifer" anytime soon. You must *live* on this board...making the rating very suitable.
-A
 
BTW....on another "Help" board that I support, I was told that the NVidia RAID drivers were NOT terribly reliable (i.e., people losing their RAID arrays because of driver flaws). I've never used NVidia RAID drivers, so I don't speak from personal experience.

As always....keep ongoing backups, RAID array or no RAID array.
 
As I understand it, you can't have a RAID 1 array with just one drive. Only RAID 0. RAID 1 is mirroring, and that requires two drives.

As I understand it, you simply want to convert your single SATA drive to a RAID 1 array by adding a like dive. That should be all that is necessary. When the RAID 1 array is created, it will mirror the loaded drive to the empty one. Both will then have the same stuff on them - that's what mirroring is.
 
The magic is getting it right so you don't mirror an empty drive over the top of the one with data 🙂

Always do backups before major drive maintenance. Always.
 
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