I have upgraded my PC from an Epox 8K5A motherboard with a Highpoint 272
RAID controller to a Gigabyte GA-8KNS motherboard with an Nvidia Nforce3 250
RAID controller.



The EPOX motherboard had 2 ATA133 connectors exclusively for the Highpoint
RAID controller and another 2 ATA133 connectors for the VIA IDE controller.
I was using a bootable RAID 0 array divided into 2 partitions using 2 Maxtor
160 GB HDD's connected to the Highpoint controller's ATA133 connectors. I
also had an AOpen DVD, an AOpen Dual Layer DVD Writer and a 160 GB Seagate
HDD connected to the VIA ATA133 controller.  I backed up my C: (bootable)
partition from the Highpoint RAID 0 array to the Seagate 160 GB HDD
connected to the VIA ATA133 controller. I was using the recovery stiffy made
using Norton Ghost 2003 to do my bootable partition backup and recovery with
no problems. Always worked 100%.



With my new system I have 2 x Seagate 160 GB SATA HDD's and 2 x Maxtor 160
GB ATA133 HDD's configured as a RAID 0 SATA array (2 x Seagate drives) and
an additional RAID 0 array (2 x Maxtor drives). I also have 2 x Seagate
200GB SATA drives connected to a Promise FastTrak TX4300 RAID controller
card set up as RAID 1 (mirroring). I want to use these 2 Seagate 200GB HDD's
to be an "Archive" from which I can recover my boot partition and also to
duplicate my important data. Hence, the reason for not using a RAID 0 array
on the Promise controller.



My problem is, whatever backup software I use, does not see the partitions
on the NVidia Nforce3 250 controller, but only the 200 GB (mirrored)
partition on the Promise FastTrak TX4300 RAID controller. My bootable
partition (C is on the 2 x Seagate 160 GB SATA RAID array.



I have tried the following backup software with no success;



Acronis True Image 9

Norton Ghost 2003

Norton Ghost 10



Does anybody know of a backup software package that will allow me to make a
backup stiffy and/or CD that can be used to backup and recover the boot
partition on the NVidia NForce RAID 0 partition to and from the RAID 1
partition on Promise Fastrack TX4300 controller?



Thanx



bluebel

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Hi bluebel,

I'd like to recommend you to consider Paragon Products, in particular
Drive Backup. I' ve used this package on my very important Dell to do
several quite different tasks - backup single drive and restore it onto
RAID, clone RAIDs, enlarge RAIDs and so on and had no problems with
their software - it worked just fine as desired.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Bluebel,

Most backup products that are "image" based, such as the ones that you
have tried, have a hard time when there is RAID controller or other
boot-level hard drive drivers involved.  The reason is because when it
comes to restoring, those drivers have to be active which are hard to
add to boot-CDs that tend to access the hard drive thru BIOS only. (not
RAID drivers)

As a result, you may have to consider a product that is more file based
and not image based.  File based (backup) programs use the existing
Windows infrastructure to access the files and therefore the RAID
controller becomes transparent to the file-based backup program.  When
you restore a computer with a file-based backup program, you will have
to reinstall Windows with the appropriate drivers with your RAID
controllers so that the restore program can restore the files using the
drivers that you have reinstalled.

If you are interested in taking a look at a file-based backup program
that can perform a recovery after Windows is re-installed, consider
looking at Backup for Workgroups.  We have a 30-day trial version with
all the features accessible during the trial period that you can
download from the website listed below.

Karl Forster
Developer of Backup for Workgroups and several other Backup programs
http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

kforster@lockstep.com wrote:
> Bluebel,
>
> Most backup products that are "image" based, such as the ones that you
> have tried, have a hard time when there is RAID controller or other
> boot-level hard drive drivers involved.  The reason is because when it
> comes to restoring, those drivers have to be active which are hard to
> add to boot-CDs that tend to access the hard drive thru BIOS only. (not
> RAID drivers)

If it's doing that then it's not a full hardware RAID card (a lot of the ATA
 one aren't) they depend on drivers to do some of their
work.
Where many of the high end (mostly SCSI) cards completely hide the RAID aspe
cts and present what looks like a single disk drive to
the BIOS. In which case it can do any level of backup including sector level
.

Dennis

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