Trouble moving W7 image to Raid

[holabr]

I just built a new system with 2 Samsung 1TB drives and a Fantom USB backup drive. I initially had the internal drives configured as seperate drives in the mobo bios. I installed Windows 7 and some primary applications and used Windows 7 backup to create a system image backup on the Fantom drive. I also created a Windows recovery CD. I am now trying to use the two Samsungs as a Raid1 array. I did this through the bios and everything looked fine. However, when I boot the recovery CD and try to restore the image to the new Raid1 array, Windows tells me it cannot find a drive for the restore. What am I doing wrong? The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-D3H with onboard Raid controller.

 

[Cerb]

I would guess that the Windows recovery CD does not have any fakeRAID support, and would require real RAID, to function. It wouldn't surprise me, though I can't verify it, if the recovery discs support no RAID of any kind.

In searching the issue, it seems that restoring to a single drive, then getting something like Acronis, and using that for the backup and restore, seems to work (example).

 

[FishAk]

Many people have trouble with Windows stock recovery/backup program. It should not be relied upon.

It may be too late, since you already changed to RAID in BIOS, but this may be worth a shot. Change back to single disk in BIOS, and try the Windows recovery disk. If that fails, try the repair option from the Windows install CD.

In order to use a free program to image a RAID array, you need to be running in Windows, or some OS that will recognized the fake RAID. I don't know of a free imaging program that will recognize a RAID array with it's recovery CD. You can get around this by installing an additional hard drive, and putting a bear bones XP OS on a 3-4Gb partition on it. On the XP drive, install Partition Wizard, Macrium Reflect, and Auslogic Defrag. These are all free. If you can find it, also install Paragon Alignment Tool. With these tools, you can work on your Raid array.

When you have Windows running again image your OS partition to your USB drive, and also to the single drive with your XP install (if you didn't just use the USB drive for the internal, XP drive). It wouldn't hurt to make 3 or 4 images to be on the safe side- but honestly, the only time I never got an image file to work is after I moved it, or let my defrag program go to town on it.

With a valid image file, you can switch to RAID on the first two disks in BIOS, than boot to the XP disk, recover an image to the RAID array, and align it. Now you should be able to boot normally to Windows on the RAID array.

 

[RebateMonger]

It's been a while since I've worked with the Win7 System Restore and a RAID card. Basically, though, there's three problems that can be encountered in doing a restore from a single disk to a RAID 1 array:

1) The Windows Recovery environment doesn't have a built-in driver for the RAID controller.
2) Once the Recovery is done, Windows is using the wrong disk controller driver (the old one from when the system was backed up) and can't repair itself to work with the new RAID controller. This will cause a Windows failure to boot after the restore is completed.
3) The RAID controller hides some of the disk capacity (for compatibility when various "same-size" disks have small variations in capacity). When doing the restore, it sees a smaller disk (RAID 1 array) than when the original backup was done and it complains.

Your problem, at least at this point, seems to be problem (1).

Again, I haven't done a system restore to a RAID array for a while. But doesn't the restore routine show a list of disks and offer the opportunity to load a disk controller driver for the restore operation? The Windows Home Server client PC recovery routines certainly do, and WHS' restore routines came from Vista which has a similar recovery system to Win7's.

It's not going to make much difference whether you are using "FakeRAID" or "RealRAID". If the Windows Recovery Environment doesn't have a driver for the disk controller and if you can't offer it a driver, then it won't be able to find the disk (or array) and do the recovery.

 

[holabr]

The recovery disk does give me the opportunity to load the Raid drivers and I do that. The problem is that the recovery program still tells me it can't find a disk to restore to. Could it be that the disk has to be the exact same one that was backed up?

 

[RebateMonger]

The recovery disk does give me the opportunity to load the Raid drivers and I do that. The problem is that the recovery program still tells me it can't find a disk to restore to. Could it be that the disk has to be the exact same one that was backed up?

The original System Restore routine in Windows Vista and Server 2008 required that the "receiving" disk (or array) be the same size or larger than the disk (or array) that was originally backed up. That created problems when you backed up a system that held a single disk and then tried to restore to the system after you'd created a RAID1 array. As I noted, RAID controllers often "hide" some of the disk space when creating a RAID array so that you can replace a failed disk with a different brand, which may be a tiny bit smaller than the original brand disk.

There was apparently a manual work-around for this that would allow you to restore to a smaller disk than was originally backed up, as long as the "new" disk (or array) had enough room to hold the actual backed-up data.

Server 2008 R2's (and, presumably, Win7's) Restore routines are supposed to allow the receiving disk to be smaller than the original disk as long as there's enough space on the receiving disk to accept the actual data being restored.

Is the Restore routine giving you an error code? That'd be helpful.