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.

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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 

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

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

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

SIRBlade,

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

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

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

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.

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