how to image/manage partitions on sata drives?

[Red Squirrel]

sata drives arn't detected by default like IDE drives, so how do you go about performing tasks such as imaging or repartitioning? If you boot with an acronis disc, or partition magic floppy, or any other such util, it wont detect sata drives since they don't use a standard interface.

Any way around this, or do you just don't image those? I was kind of hoping to image my machine to make a reinstall quick if ever I need to, and I also want to repartition as I installed a new HDD and transfered the data to it. Am I SOL?

 

[QuixoticOne]

I think it would depend on your BIOS' capabilities as well as its configuration.

In my experience with more recent motherboards their BIOS maps SATA drives
just like PATA drives, so even legacy OSs like DOS, Win95, etc. will be able to
'see' and run off of SATA drives attached to motherboard controllers.

It is a similar case with add-on controllers with BIOS extensions onboard.

If you ensure that the motherboard BIOS and SATA controller / RAID
controller BIOS is updated as fully as possible (and is enabled), you
may find that you have no major problem.

The configuration matters in that if you configure the SATA drives' modes as
individual disks or JBOD then operating systems and programs should be able
to see the individual drives and their partitions without problem.

If you however configure the drives as a RAID group it may not be fully usable
without software RAID drivers loaded into the operating system unless your
hardware is doing totally 'transparent' hardware assisted RAID that needs no
operating system drivers.

Once you load any necessary drivers for your SATA controllers and/or RAID
controllers, though, any software running under your operating system should
be able to detect/image/backup your logical partitions without problem in the
case of a software-assisted RAID and it should be able to analyze/image the
physical drives and partitions in the case of non-RAID SATA disks.

If you use "standalone" software that doesn't run under an OS for drive data
imaging then you may have a problem seeing drives attached to RAID or
SATA controllers that software doesn't have built in drivers for in the case
where the system BIOS doesn't manage the controllers' drives fully.
In such a case I'd try to get an updated 'driver' or library or whatever
for the backup product in question that allows it to access those kinds of
SATA/RAID controllers.

However in the best non-software-RAID case no special software will be needed
due to BIOS support of the controllers.

If you want best-compatibility for RAID SATA configurations, use a RAID mode
or RAID controller that is totally hardware/BIOS operated and which is 100%
transparent to any program / operating system. This might well be the case
with simple RAID-0 or RAID-1 modes, but is less likely to be the case for
more advanced RAID-5 and other modes.

In any case you should be able to backup logical partitions and logical volumes
from within an OS with the appropriate controller / RAID drivers loaded.

If you can get access to the individual drives from a low level backip utility you
should be able to clone the drives too, though in the case of a RAID that's
usually not terribly useful since it'll not be always possible to use any
"backup" of an individual RAID disk's contents absent the contents of
the other drives that are part of a striped or RAID-5 set. Mirrored drives
are more usable independently, of course.

Often there's some capability to use a BIOS or software tool that comes with
your SATA/RAID controller to "clone" or regenerate a newly
installed RAID drive's proper contents based on intact units already in the
RAID to replace data on a failed drive which had been in a RAID-5 or mirrored
set.

I guess in the worst cases naive single drive imaging programs become
less useful than RAID management and logical volume oriented backup utilities.

You should learn to boot into an OS in some kind of administrative or
safe-mode that's got any needed SATA/RAID drivers in place and backup
software but under which there aren't going to be many/any programs actively
using the data on the SATA/RAID system so you can do backups and such
more safely without the data being backed up being under frequent use.

 

[QuixoticOne]

PS

quick reinstall: yes, you're right to want to do some kind of imaging at the
logical partition level at least. You may not need to image at the physical drive
level in the case of a RAID set to get a quickly reinstallable image of the
boot and data partitions. You'd just need to configure/create a new
physical or logical volume (e.g. drive or RAID set) of a compatible
size and virtual 'geometry' to be the 'destination' of your restore operation
and then restore to that. After that it should be indistinguishable to the OS
level from your original setup.
In the case of single non-RAID drives there's no good reason that with the
right BIOS and backup software you shouldn't be able to image a byte for
byte copy of the whole drive or at the partition level.

moving files and partition images around between old drives and new
drives -- this is pretty much always painful and somewhat limited in
convenience / capacity even if you don't have a RAID, and often times nearly
impossible to do with full flexibility if you do have a RAID.

Generally it should be possible to do anything you want on non-RAID SATA
drives to do if you have the right tools / BIOS / drivers / settings.

Often times it's hard or impossible to add or delete drives
to an already established RAID-5 set once you've defined it a certain way
and then you decide you want more or less space 'permanently'.
That's just a limit of whatever controller / management software you have.
It should be easy to replace any single defective drive in a RAID-5 set
and have things keep working with no data loss just using the RAID tools alone.

If you have a mirrored set and one drive is to be replaced it should be possible
to re-create the mirror from a "master drive" by using the RAID tools to copy
its data to a new empty drive of similar size.

If you want to unmirror a set it should be possible to just shut down when the
mirror is in sync and just remove / delete the mirrored drive and have everything
keep working from the fully updated master drive alone when you configure it
to operate alone.

Sometimes motherboards have two different SATA controllers, one on the
main chipset and another as an added 3rd party (Promise, Silicon Image, et. al.)
controller. It's possible that some BIOS / tool support may work better when
you attach a drive to one controller vs. the other if you have that choice.

 

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[Red Squirrel]

So this is something I can change in bios? What would I look for and will it affect the current data on the drives? I'm not using raid, just directly plugged in with no added configuration.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Depends on your BIOS and what kind of SATA controller you have.

In my ASUS P5K BIOS there's an option to choose SATA drive mode as
"[RAID]", "[IDE]" or "[AHCI]", and "[IDE]" would be the right choice
for your situation.

Some BIOSs have a way to enable "[JBOD]" mode vs "[RAID]" mode or
whatever, in which case JBOD would be more right than RAID mode.

If there's ever any option to enable or disable BIOS for the SATA controller or
enable / disable bootability of the drives in general (which is not to say making
one your actual boot device if you don't want to), enable BIOS, enable
at least the possibility to boot them, enable DOS/legacy OS SATA drive support
if there's such an option, etc.

Updating the BIOS version to the latest main release for the motherboard
or SATA controller (if it's an add-in card or has a distinct BIOS download on your
motherboard/system manfacturer's site) might help.

Otherwise, find out a way to add support for that SATA controller type in
your imaging software through an upgrade or patch or driver or whatever.

All my SATA drives show up as normal drives when I do these things, but
I don't run the same backup software you have.