move OS from IDE drive to SATA Raid

[tlviewer]

Hello,

I want to move an OS from an IDE drive to a SATA Raid drive.

I have a well developed Win2k sp4 installation
running on c:\ of an IDE drive.

I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and RAM, then built
a Raid0 SATA array using two SATA Maxtor 6B300S0 drives.

The Raid0 drive was partitioned as C:,D:,E:, & F:, then
WinXP sp2 was installed to C:.

Next installed was Ghost 2003, to help clone the old
IDE OS into Raid0 D:

Will Ghost allow me to clone the Win2k install from
IDE C: to Raid0 D:? Is there a better way?

If I manage to clone the Win2k OS over, then I plan
to edit the Boot.ini in C: for Dual, then do an In-place
upgrade of Win2k in D:

Any comments are welcome,
tlviewer

 

[Galen]

In

Will Ghost allow me to clone the Win2k install from
IDE C: to Raid0 D:? Is there a better way?

It does a fine job with similar work here. In my case it's always SATA to
SATA (partitions) or IDE to IDE (partitions) though so I'm not 100% certain
but I believe it will do the job just fine. I'm not usually a proponent of
Symantec products however I've found that Ghost 2k3 is the best tool for the
job. There are tools from the drive manufacturer that will clone your
partition or drive as well usually. So some might say that there's a better
way. I personally prefer Ghost 2k3 myself and use it to make regular drive
images as my backups. Instead of re-installing the OS all over and all the
applications I am able to have a complete system restore without data loss
in a few minutes.

Galen
--

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me
the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am
in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial
stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for
mental exaltation." -- Sherlock Holmes

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

You may well have difficulties with the drive letter assignments. If you
leave the IDE drive in the computer, it will have the drive letter C and the
SATA raid partitions will still be D etc. So, even if you change the
content of the boot.ini, the OS, installed programs etc. will be set up to
use the drive letter of C, not D. An in-place upgrade may or may not fix up
all of the drive letter references (particularly for application programs).

If your BIOS has support for it, you might be able to change the settings so
that the first partition on the SATA raid is the boot drive, instead of the
IDE drive (particularly if you remove the IDE drive); this may make it
possible to boot and have the first partion on the SATA drive as the C drive
letter. However, Windows keeps track of what drive letter is assigned to
which partition, so this might not work.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/EN-US/
and http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q249321.

Most cloning procedures/software assume that the target installation will
have the same disk configuration as the source, at least as far as the
"system" and "boot" partitions are concerned.

However, if you are willing to experiment and investigate subsequent
problems, then give it a try. You might want to see if sysprep would be
useful (in Support\Tools\deploy.cab), althought this is realy intended for
deploying to multiple computers.

If you intend to keep the installation around for a while, you may be better
off in the long run to do a clean install into the SATA drive's partitions.

Regardless, if this system is "production" and supporting some business
function, make sure you have a good backup before proceeding!

--
Bruce Sanderson MVP Printing
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders

It is perfectly useless to know the right answer to the wrong question.



Hello,

I want to move an OS from an IDE drive to a SATA Raid drive.

I have a well developed Win2k sp4 installation
running on c:\ of an IDE drive.

I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and RAM, then built
a Raid0 SATA array using two SATA Maxtor 6B300S0 drives.

The Raid0 drive was partitioned as C:,D:,E:, & F:, then
WinXP sp2 was installed to C:.

Next installed was Ghost 2003, to help clone the old
IDE OS into Raid0 D:

Will Ghost allow me to clone the Win2k install from
IDE C: to Raid0 D:? Is there a better way?

If I manage to clone the Win2k OS over, then I plan
to edit the Boot.ini in C: for Dual, then do an In-place
upgrade of Win2k in D:

Any comments are welcome,
tlviewer

 

[tlviewer]

Bruce,

You may well have difficulties with the drive letter assignments. If you
leave the IDE drive in the computer, it will have the drive letter C and the
SATA raid partitions will still be D etc. So, even if you change the
content of the boot.ini, the OS, installed programs etc. will be set up to
use the drive letter of C, not D. An in-place upgrade may or may not fix up
all of the drive letter references (particularly for application programs).

If your BIOS has support for it, you might be able to change the settings so
that the first partition on the SATA raid is the boot drive, instead of the
IDE drive (particularly if you remove the IDE drive); this may make it
possible to boot and have the first partion on the SATA drive as the C drive
letter. However, Windows keeps track of what drive letter is assigned to
which partition, so this might not work.

Thanks for your detailed response. I ended up going through this twice,
succeeding the second time without trouble. The first time I failed becuase
I crossed over, moving the IDE C: installation to Raid0 D:. As you mentioned
its not reasonable to expect an inplace-upgrade to fix the drive letters in
the
registry. The second time, I started with WinXP sp2 in D:, partition(2).

When I originally installed WinXPsp2, the IDE drive was disconnected,
leaving only
the SATA Raid0 array. When I did the Ghost clone later, the IDE was
connected
as slave, then configured in the Bios to boot after the SATA. However, its
drive
index caused my SATA drive to be mis-labeled in boot.ini. I got around this
trouble by having an editable boot floppy at hand, so I could change the
drive
indexes in boot.ini as I went along.

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000
Professional" /fastdetect

IOW, the "rdisk" index changed to one, and then back after I finished
Ghosting over.
It was a little painful to redo the WinXPsp2 install into Raid0
D:,partition(2).

Next it was tricky to find a way to format Raid0 C:, partition(1). I did
this by
starting a new install of Win2k sp4 with the CD, recreating partition(1),
formatting it, then
shutting the machine down once it started copying files (abort). I couldn't
see
any other way to abort the install.

After shutting the machine down, I booted up with the floppy into WinXP
(D:, partition(2), deleted the WinNT fragments, then Ghosted over the
IDE C: installation.

After this everything went very smooth with the in-place upgrade. The
Raid0 Win2k OS looks and behaves like before, but at the new Raid0 level of
performance. All my Office Apps and personal data were undamaged.