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I have two 150GB SATA drives in hardware RAID 0, on which I have my C: (Win XP) and D: (installed apps).
I'm migrating to Windows 7, but I want to keep my XP system until I've got it all running smoothly.
So I want to:
- break the RAID
- move C: and D: to one of the drives (there's enough room)
- use the other drive for Win 7
- boot into one or the other
Clearly I can't move C: and D: after breaking the RAID, so I'm assuming I need to image the two partitions first, then break the RAID and restore the images to one of the drives.
So my questions are:
- Is this possible?
- If so, what would be a good (free) imaging/restore tool?
- How do I ensure that the drive will boot after restoring the images?
- What sort of gotchas should I look out for?
If there's a better solution than this, I'd be grateful for suggestions.
Thanks!
Update...
All migrated to Windows 7 now. I didn't succeed with the imaging, since for reasons I haven't yet got to the bottom of, I couldn't boot into the Paragon restore CD I'd created after creating the images. In the end, it was taking longer to get the imaging sorted out, than just reinstalling from scratch without the safety net.
Thanks..
Thanks for this. I did mention it's hardware RAID-0, though, so does this materially change the approach? My C: and D: partitions will easily fit on to one of the de-RAIDed drives, and I've got all the installation bits and pieces - I just want to avoid reinstalling the many apps I currently have! I'll look into the Paragon and Driver backups apps you mention, so thanks for that too. – ChrisA – 2010-05-29T10:04:09.990
@chris5gd: The hardware RAID-0 only means more things to do. – harrymc – 2010-05-29T11:23:08.927