Just thought I'd give some feed back to the community on the subject of a backup restore of a 5 disc RAID10 array, and the only way I managed to get a successful backup that I could restore from.

Relevant Hardware details.
Motherboard = Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6
5 * Seagate 160Gb SATA HDD configured as 4 drive RAID10 with spare disc.

3 Disc Partition. XP=150GB Vista=130GB DATA=20GB
OS's installed independent of Each other.
BOOTSTRAP used = Acronis DiscDirector10

Cut a long story short I was able to backup (image) to a stand alone 400GB PATA HDD disc, of the RAID system, using Ghost 12, and boot up from this disc.
I re-created the RAID array, to simulate a catastrophic loss of data, and attempted to image the data back from the 400GB PATA HDD.
Dear oh dear oh dear. 95% of the attempts to recover the XP partition first failed with "LBA" not addressable errors at what seemed to be a random LBA number, and if in the end if did succeed, when re-storing the Vista partition after testing boot up of the XP partition was successful, this caused corruption in the XP partition.
This was using Ghost 12 booted up from the "backup" image created on the 400GB PATA disc, so all the necessary drivers were loaded, and can confirm no DISC errors or VIRUS where present.

Not liking to "HAVE" to be "HOT-Imaging", I decided to look to the Acronis route, using a BART-PE environment, with the relevant drivers.
Worked first time, and every time, i.e. backup to single PATA HDD and then back again to the RAID works a charm.
Also one of the benefits of not doing a "HOT-IMAGE" environment is the fact that the Zonealarm settings are copied between images. This didn't happen under Ghost.

Been using Ghost for 8 years up until now. It's Acronis True Image Home for me from now on.
One last thing, the image, clones, copying, what ever you want to call it took slightly longer under Acronis, but hey that's a small price to pay for successful backup/restores.

SIRBlade,

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Which Acronis TI Home version are you using?

Quote:

but hey that's a small price to pay for successful backup/restores.

After reading all that, the word that jumped out at me was, "PAY".
If you like the way Acronis backs up your HD that's fine, but, you don't have to pay for it or install all that 'gobbledygook' on your HD. (bloat!)

Acronis True Image is available for FREE to any Maxtor or Seagate user.
It comes with MaxBlast from Maxtor and Sea Tools from Seagate.  Both are FREE.  I have both, on boot CD's and I've used both to backup & clone my HD's with XP and Vista.
I just used the ATI from Seatools again today, to clone a WD drive to a Seagate drive.  It works just fine and fairly fast too.

So if you've got money to throw away, send it to me.  But if you don't, then get ATI for FREE from the two sources I've mentioned above.

Cheers Mates!
the Shadow  8-)

Demigod.

It's Version's name is in the main title ... i.e Home 2009. Can't seem to see where within the program though for a build number.

The Shadow. My set-up was a RAID array with two Seperate paritions, XP and Vista, which are invisible to each other, and a 3rd partition for shared data between the two OS's. I'd like to see the "Free" versions handle that. Incidently the boostrap used was Acronis Disc Director so works a dream with True Image.
You get what you pays for in this life... although some things are free,

SIRBlade wrote on Nov 17^th, 2008 at 5:34pm:

It's Version's name is in the main title ... i.e Home 2009

SIRBlade, I must have been having a bad day!!

TheShadow wrote on Nov 12^th, 2008 at 3:56pm:

Acronis True Image is available for FREE to any Maxtor or Seagate user.

linkage?

Blade, are you employed by acronis? (we welcome all cloning prgms.)

I tried to use True Image 2009 Home but couldn't get it to work. Kept getting error messages that said "The operation failed." (or something like that).

Tried a few times. Uninstalled & reinstalled, but couldn't make it work. (I have a 3-year old laptop with a 160-gig internal Western Digital drive (multi-partition NTFS) and an external USB drive made by Seagate .. formatted as FAT32)

No big deal, cuz there are so many other cloning programs available.

Rad..
Nope don't work for Acronis. Work in the telecomms business, and in the IT side of things for years.

Rad.
Just as an addendum. I had tried to use ghost 12 to provide me with a backup/restore function for the best part of a month. Weekend and evening's that is.
With the config that I had running, the restore just wouldn't work, so tried the Acronis route. Surprised it worked so well.
Just though I'd provide feed back to any one else wanting to set-up a dual boot set-up with independent OS's ... i.e. when booting to Vista there's no option for "previous version of Windows"

I would have liked to have made a BartPe version with Ghost 12 to see if that would have sorted out my problems, thinking that native Ghost 12 can't deal with the Intel INCH9R bios properly, and hence causing the XP partition to become corrupt when restoring the Vista partition.
Incidentally I used Symantec support to help me out with a "Dual boot" backup/restore, only for them to point out that Ghost 12 does not support Windows Dual Boot backup/restore. Ah well!!

SIRBlade,


SIRBlade wrote on Nov 18^th, 2008 at 10:27am:

Incidentally I used Symantec support to help me out with a "Dual boot" backup/restore, only for them to point out that Ghost 12 does not support Windows Dual Boot backup/restore.

I'm not sure why they would say that as I dual booted two WinXPs for a year while using Ghost 12.


Quote:

OS's installed independent of Each other.

I think I understand what you mean but just to be sure, was each OS C: drive when it was booted?

Brian.

Yes that's correct. however using the Windows way of dual boot still gives both systems having a C: drive.
The method I'm on about is already having XP installed, if you install Vista to a new parition, and the new partition is set to "ACTIVE" Vista installs bootup files to this new Partition and leaves the XP parition alone. This means the bootup files for XP are unmodified.
An excellent description about the pluses of such a set-up can be found here.. http://www.multibooters.co.uk/

Hope that helps Brian.

SIRBlade,

Thanks. That's how I do it too. In my test computer I've got about 15 items in the boot menu. Several WinXPs, Vista, various DOS partitions (testing tools, automatic image restores, automatic network restores), two BartPE partitions, Image for Linux, Ubuntu.


Quote:

and hence causing the XP partition to become corrupt when restoring the Vista partition.

This line interested me. Why do you think it happened with independent OS?

Brian,

I have no idea, just a hunch. With Ghost, booting up from the Ghost 12 CD, it's not loading drivers specficallly for ICH9R, so corrupts the partition metadata when a second partition is written.
When using Acronis, because your are able to create a BartPE, boot up disc, with the correct and latest bug free drivers for ICH9R .. works a treat.
That's my thinking anyway.