Peter's Blog

No, not WoW, something techy for a change, how to migrate a Dell Precision 390 to Raid.

My Dell Precision 390 came with a SAS Raid controller and a pair of 143G disks. However it had been configured with one disk as a plain drive C and the other unconfigured. I had the following options:

• format the spare drive and use it as drive G: or mount it as a folder under the C drive. I didn't want to do this as it involves having to manage two drives which I don't want to worry about which disk a file will be stored on.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 0. Raid 0 would give me in effect a fast single 270G drive but it would have half the reliability of the single drive: if either drive dies I lose all my data.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 1. Raid 1 would store everything on both drives, giving me two copies of everything. If one drive dies, the data is already on the other drive. They call this mirroring, it is not exactly like a real-time backup as if you accidently delete a file, both copies on both disks are instantly deleted. Raid 1 only saves you from drive failures, not OS level errors.

I decided on (drum roll) Raid 0. Raid 0 and Raid 1 will give some speed improvements (maybe 10-20%) but I wanted the advantages of 270G of linear disk space. This is my home PC and apart from family photos there is not much 'critical' data on it: I won't lose my job if it went pear shaped.

How to reconfigure it? The OS is on one of the disks that will go into the Raid array which makes things interesting. Here are the steps:

• Download the trial version of True Image 10
• Use it to create a recovery CD
• Make sure you can boot from the recovery CD. Since my system was SAS (serial SCSI) I used the 'full' recovery program, not the simple DOS one.
• Reboot to windows
• Use True Image to backup the windows partition to a USB hard disk. This took about an hour, 46G of data used 35.6G of disk space.
• Reboot PC into Dell SAS bios and set up your disks in a Raid array (0 or 1). When it warns about you losing all your data laugh in it's face.
• Reboot from Windows XP installation disk. Go through the part of the setup that creates an NTFS partition. After this, when windows starts copying files, kill the setup. This step is necessary because the trial edition of True Image cannot create NTFS partitions.
• Reboot from the True Image recovery CD.
• Use the Restore option to restore the backup of the partition to your new NTFS partition. This took less than two hours.
• Reboot into Windows Installation CD. This time go into the recovery console.
• Run the following commands:

  fixmbr
  fixboot
  bootscan /rebuild
  

  Bootscan will prompt you for a name for the partition and boot parameters. Give it a name that shows suitable contempt for Windows and leave the options blank. My Dell came with two partitions, one containing Dell Diagnostics and one containing Windows. When I restored I had zapped the Dell Diagnostics partition as all that stuff is on a CD anyway. However it meant that my restored Windows system didn't boot because the boot.ini file was telling the boot loader that it was on the second partition rather than the first. Hence I needed the bootscan /rebuild to get the restored partition added to the boot.ini. True Image will restore the MBR itself, I just did all this to make sure (it takes ages to boot the recovery console so I did everything I could there to get things working).
• Reboot into Windows. You may be prompted which partition to boot from, choose the one you added with bootscan.
• Clean up boot.ini. The following should be ok:

  [boot loader]
  timeout=30
  default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
  [operating systems]
  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
  

For some idea of speed, Firefox nows boots in three seconds. Open Office Write boots in four seconds. It's quick.

I was very impressed with True Image and could be tempted to buy it ($50):

• It can be used for daily incremental backups that are easily capable of restoring the system and not just to the original hard drive but to any other drive if necessary.
• It handles USB and SCSI without blinking.
• It can resize partitions as it restores them.
• It will 'clone' disks (copy contents of one to another). This is the first time I've used a tool like this that has actually worked.
• You can restore individual files from the backup

For $50 I could have True Image handling daily backups to my USB disk and still be able to sleep nights with my unreliable Raid 0 array.