It's a RAID
Not that sort of raid, but a RAID configuration for my hard drives.<br /><br />After reading an article in PC Format about the speed benefits of RAID0 I decided to give it a go (not for the faint hearted). I had also read that if I used my mainboard's built in RAID controller and then upgraded the motherboard the RAID drive would be useless if the RAID controller chipset was different. So, I went for a PCI-E SATA2 RAID Controller card instead for portability.<br /><br />The whole process took 2 days to complete: <br /><br />Wednesday 16th May:<br />I had an initial bash at the RAID situation after receiving the SATA RAID Controller card. The RAID set up was relatively straight forward after I realised that the card was set to use only the external SATA ports rather than the internal?!? I striped (RAID0) the two new SATA2 250Gb drives together and the MB bios detected it correctly. Booted to a CD version of Paragon Software Hard Drive Manager 8.5 to begin transferring partitions. Also, no problems. But…<br /><br />When it came to removing the primary drive to give way for the RAID drive it failed to boot. I thought it probably would so I booted to the Vista DVD and selected Repair. It couldn't see my drive, so I gave it the necessary drivers and it still couldn't see it, although it could because now I could browse for drivers on the RAID drives! Confusing. Time to sleep.<br /><br />Thursday 17th May:<br />After googling on my server it turned out that you cannot add drivers using a repair option. Crap. I had read elsewhere, during my search, that the best way was to go through a partial install on the new drive and after the first reboot copy the original vista install on top.<br /><br />So, I tried that but Vista now said that I had no drives capable of handling a system partition. Odd I thought. So. My next idea was perhaps to try an XP x64 install and then do an upgrade to Vista, then copy the partition (long winded I know). I booted to the XP x64 annoying blue installer, had to put the damn SATA drivers onto a floppy disk (after searching the house to find one)! And then it gave me the same error as Vista except with more detail:<br /><br />Cannot install XP because there are no partitions on a primary drive available to hold boot information (thank you thats what I needed).<br /><br />So, I booted back to the Vista Installer and setup a small 4Gb partition on my MB hosted SATA drive called 'Boot', added the drivers for the RAID drive and selected the partition I had created for Vista (50Gb) and it started the install.<br /><br />After the first restart I copied the Vista partition from my old drive over the top, copied my Apps partition over and then removed the old drive again. Reboot and hey presto Vista booted lovely and had no complaints. So, I copied my remaining partitions Games, Online Games and Data to the RAID.<br /><br />After 10 minutes Vista asked to activate again! Gulp. The automatic activation failed, so I had to call MS and talk them through why I was reactivating. They were fine with it and gave me an activation code to use. Phew.Over the next few days (before my Holiday – more later) I'm going to be checking everything to make sure it copied OK.<br /><br /><br />