Backing up and recovering from C Drive failure

[TheForce]

I have a Sony Vaio here that came factory using two physical 200Gb HD's in Raid 0 for 400 Gb total. I never could understand the need for that configuration but now would like to convert it to a single 500 Gb C Drive with a second drive I keep as a Ghost clone backup so if the main drive fails I can just swap out. Is this the best route or should I consider a Raid 1 using two 500Gb drives, so if one fails, I will have one always ready to go.

What is the best way to achieve the conversion? I have Ghost v9 and Ghost v15.

Can I simply swap out the 200Gb drives for unpartitioned 500 Gb and then switch the configuration in the computer to Raid 1, then transfer a backup image of the original Raid 0 pair located on my D drive back to the new 500Gb drive pair?

How do I set MBR?

One issue I have with Raid 1 is that while it insures a ready up to date backup in case of physical drive failure, it also puts equal wear and tare to both drives. Using a rarely connected clone drive insures a like new condition backup drive in the event of failure. I do not store data on my C drive, only program installation and any internet cache data which is non critical.


If I decide to go the single drive route, I will need to kill the RAID function in the OS, right? There is an instruction set on doing this in the Help and Support files under Start menu. I just never did this before.

I DO NOT want to reinstall all my software.

 

[mike123abc]

If you have Vista or Win 7, get an USB drive and use the system image backup. It will make a complete image of your C: partition, it does not matter if it is raid or not. Note that you have to have the same size or larger drive to restore back to. You then boot up with the Windows installation DVD and go in and restore it under the repairing your computer instead of installing.

Note that it works as C:, so your replacement drive does not have to be raid. If you are using raid in the bios you will need to keep the drive set that way (not change it to AHCI) until you have booted windows. Then you need to go into the registry and change the value so it will then load the AHCI driver instead of blue screen of death because it cannot find the C: drive after boot since it has the raid driver not the AHCI driver loaded.

If you want to use a smaller drive (like switching to a flash disk), you need to shrink your drive before you do the image backup. It has to be smaller (or equal) to the restore drive.

 

[TheForce]

Forgot to mention this computer is an XP Home 32 bit version. But Ghost will work with USB drives. Just have to restore with the boot up via the Ghost CD.

I'm considering trying to replace the twin 200Gb drives with a single 500 Gb drive.