How do we transfer Vista32 to raid 1.

[mysts]

We've got Vista32 on an ide harddrive and we would like to transfer it to raid 1 using two serial harddrives. The serial drives are connected to a Promise pci plugin card.
What steps should we take to accomplish this.

[aedipuss]

don't. leave the os on the single drive to boot from and use the raid 1 for data. raid 1 is a single drive mirrored, just a way to backup data. it's not until you use raid 3, 5, or 6 you get fault tolerance for a failing drive.

[mysts]

To aedipuss:

Thanks for your reply. Our situation requires that the OS, programs, and data be connected up as raid 1.

[guns1inger]

The you have to reinstall from scratch or, perhaps, look at one of the imaging tools such as Acronis TrueImage.

However you cannot just copy Vista and the applications across to a new drive and expect it to work.

[mysts]

To gunslinger:

If I use the cloning feature in Acronis would the copy then work?

[hanugro]

You can also try ghost2003 (latest version work with SATA).

[aedipuss]

just a friendly warning. if you create a raid 1 array and use it as the boot device, if one of the drives fails you will probably not be able to boot the computer. it is not a failsafe array.

[mysts]

True. But if you rebuild the array it will then boot ok.

[aedipuss]

ok. just make sure to have a couple spare drives on hand

try imaging the drives onto the array and then changing the boot drive in the motherboard bios to the array, that's if it supports booting from a pci plugin card of course......

[redwudz]

RAID 1 will give you some redundancy. If one drive fails, you can replace it and rebuild the array. But it also will run slower than a single drive and I see no advantage with that. Just a waste of a extra drive. If you needed backup, it would be more efficient to just use a single boot drive and a program like True Image or Ghost and put the backup on a separate disk or on a few DVDs.

But if you really want to, you should be able to image the original boot drive and put it on a RAID 1 setup. But it would be easier with less problems to just do a fresh install of the OS. And I would also keep a spare drive handy if one in the array dies.