ghost 2003 can see my big drive on my raid controller

[Irwin]

I did not expect Ghost 2003 in DOS mode to be able to see my 250 gb
SATA drive hanging off the on-board RAID/SATA controller (not set up as
RAID), but in the process of backing up one IDE drive to another IDE
drive in the same box, I see that it fact does name and identify that
SATA drive and even lists the size correctly and can see the partitions
on it. I had just assumed, erroneously obviously, that it would need
special drivers to see it at all.

Of course, seeing it is one thing, but reading and writing to it
properly might be a different matter and I don't want to experience
data loss. Naturally, there is nothing in the manual about this. Does
anyone else have any experience with this situation? Why can ghost 2003
in DOS mode see it at all? Will ghost read and write to it properly
without special drivers?

Thank you, happy holiday,

Irwin

 

[Bob Davis]

I did not expect Ghost 2003 in DOS mode to be able to see my 250 gb
SATA drive hanging off the on-board RAID/SATA controller (not set up as
RAID), but in the process of backing up one IDE drive to another IDE
drive in the same box, I see that it fact does name and identify that
SATA drive and even lists the size correctly and can see the partitions
on it. I had just assumed, erroneously obviously, that it would need
special drivers to see it at all.

Of course, seeing it is one thing, but reading and writing to it
properly might be a different matter and I don't want to experience
data loss. Naturally, there is nothing in the manual about this. Does
anyone else have any experience with this situation? Why can ghost 2003
in DOS mode see it at all? Will ghost read and write to it properly
without special drivers?

Ghost 2003 should see any drive reported by the bios without drivers. On my
system, it sees and uses my C: drive, which is a RAID0 array of two SATA
drives connected to the ICH5R (on-chip) controller. Ghost will also see USB
and firewire drives, but only if you load drivers during the floppy boot
process. Frankly, I never got the USB drivers to work, as they would always
lock-up when loading--but Firewire works fine here.

Since most on-board controllers initialize before Ghost launches, it should
see these drives too. In an older setup I once owned, PIII with an on-board
RAID controller, Ghost could see the RAID0 drives (PATA) with no trouble.
If it "sees" the drives, i.e. shows in the list and aren't grayed out, it
should be able to read from and write to them. If they are grayed out and
can't be selected, my experience is that they must be partitioned and/or
formated before use.