Problems cloning array via Acronis 2

[kmcferrin]

I just bought some new parts to build a new PC, and I'm having trouble creating a clone of the old system so that I can use the old hard disks in the new system. This is what I'm working with at the moment:

A64 3000+
Asus K8NE (not deluxe) NF3-250 mainboard
2 Western Digital 250 GB SATA drives in a RAID 1 array using the nVidia controller split into a 160 and 80 GB partitions. The 160 GB is the boot/system disk.
XP Pro SP2 + current patches
Acronis 10

I've added an old Maxtor 80 GB PATA so that I could make a copy of the data on the 80 GB partition. Since it was just our MP3 collection I did a direct copy from within Windows and it worked just fine.

Then I bought a Seagate 7200.10 160 GB PATA drive to back up the boot/system partition with. It is installed on the primary IDE channel, jumpered as master, and the 80 GB PATA has been removed. The goal here is to clone the system onto the new PATA drive so that I can have this system up and running, and then use the two SATA drives to build my new system.

I run Acronis and tell it to clone the 160 GB partition from the nVidia array to the 160 GB PATA, and it appears to work successfully. I get finished with the clone process and it tells me to shut down the system and remove the old disks. But I want to verify that everything is working correctly before I take apart that array, so instead I just change the boot sequence in the BIOS so that it tries to boot from the PATA instead of the array. But when the system begins to boot it just presents me with a flashing "_" prompt. It doesn't even try to get into Windows, trying to hit F5 or F8 obviously has no effect. At first I thought it must have been a bad clone, so I re-did the clone process and got the same result.

If I boot from the SATA array I can browse the PATA disk from within Windows, and it looks like all of the files and folders are there. I just can't boot from it. I've tried booting from an XP CD to do a repair install, but can't get that to work either. I hit "Enter" at the "Press any key to boot from CD" prompt, and it looks like it tries to boot then goes to a black screen.

I haven't tried this yet, but it just occurred to me to try a BartPE disk to see if it can see the hard disk. I've really only got two ideas what could be going wrong here:

1. The system still wants to boot from the RAID controller, even though I told it to boot from the PATA drive. But if that were the case I would expect it to boot into Windows.

2. The RAID controller has written some sort of a signature to the array and Acronis is copying that to the new disk as well, which it doesn't like.

Although an option 3 just popped into my head, and that is that the array controller can do PATA and SATA arrays instead of just SATA, and I haven't bothered to tell it how to address the PATA drive so it doesn't think that it's bootable?

What are your guys thoughts?

With the nForce 3 RAID controller, is it possible to break the mirror and end up with two indepentdently bootable disks?

 

[firewolfrl]

Ok this is what I would do
it sounds like you a put in a new motherboard?
I would clone the OS to a single drive in your new system.
do a repair install....with the F6 option to get the raid controller drivers on the system.
Put the old original drive away so you are not damaging access to the old original data.
I would make sure the drive works and boots up fine then I would clone that drive to the array...as it has all the working drivers of the raid controller preinstalled


all the boot options are in the BIOS

 

[kmcferrin]

Sorry that I was unclear, I have not put any new parts in the system except for the 160 GB PATA drive. I definitely have not moved the array to the new system, as they use different chipsets/array controllers and that would likely result in data loss. This is all happening on my old system that is otherwise functioning normally.

The goal is to clone the OS to a single drive (the 160 GB PATA) in the old system. Once I have that working then I will run the old system off the the 160 GB PATA drive, and then move the two SATA drives to the new system, wipe them, and install a clean OS. So the old system gets the PATA drive, and the new system is completely new except for the two SATA drives.

At this point I am having trouble cloning the SATA array to the PATA drive. I wanted to try a repair install, but for some reason booting from the XP CD wouldn't let me get that far (maybe it doesn't see any hard disks)? I shouldn't need the F6 drivers because a) I can't get the far into the repair process, and b) I'm trying to boot from/repair the "newly imaged" single PATA disk, not an array.

 

[firewolfrl]

Ahhh!

That is somewhat a simple fix


first things first you have to have the 160 drive zeroed out...not formated it has to have the MBR completely zeroed.
if the drive is not zeroed it just will not work.

then clone with the Acronis software


after the clone is done shut down pull the drive and slave it in a working system
go to the boot.ini file and set it up the correct way it needs to be
remove all the drives from the old system and master the 160
boot and it should work

 

[kmcferrin]

I'm not sure that makes much sense. If Acronis is doing a bitcopy of the existing drive/array, then the 160 would get the MBR from the array, regardless of whether it was zeroed out before the cloning.

I would also say that I have used Acronis several times in the past to clone disks with Windows XP installed on them, and I have never had any issues or been required to fiddle with the MBR or boot.ini.

 

[cdogg]

Here are some thoughts:

--> Because you are not seeing an error at all, that leads me to believe something is not getting copied correctly in the MBR for one reason or another (although this has worked for you in the past). So as a test, I would use the following utility:

http://www.geocities.com/mbrwizard/

Make a backup using the utility on the SATA array, then restore it on the PATA disk.


--> Another option is to simply do a quick, clean install of XP on the PATA drive. Then overwrite the contents with those from your SATA array using a copying utility like this one:

http://www.download.com/DriveImage-XML/3000-2242_4-10635362.html?tag=lst-0-4

--> Try detaching the SATA array from the system while you boot with the PATA disk. It could be that the reason you're not getting an error is because the boot.ini is looking for the wrong disk number (disk 0 might be pointing to the SATA array, so it's finding the NT system files, but stalls when the OS refers to C.


Yeah, each drive on a mirrored array should be ready to run independently at any moment. I haven't worked much with mirrors, but that's the idea anyway!

Good luck...

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[kmcferrin]

Hmmm...I'll have to check, but I seem to recall in Disk Management it shows Disk 0 as being the PATA when it is installed, but maybe boot.ini points at Disk 1 instead. So maybe I can just modify the boot.ini on the PATA while the system is booted from the SATA array and see if that helps.

I'll take a look at that when I get home tonight, along with the MBR copy.

The only reason why I didn't detach the array was because I didn't want to risk losing any data until I had verified that it was all there. But maybe I'll try that too.

 

[firewolfrl]

Ok now I have to say this.
You have to zero the MBR...you really have no choice.
The master boot record is cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1, the first sector on the disk.
format and disk copy operations only touch a small area of the 512 bytes of the MBR.
Both the
Master Partition Table
and
Master Boot Code
Reside within the MBR

But, So does some software tags. Windows uses the MBR to see if there are changes. Intuit software use areas of the MBR for copy protection. This area is not copied byte per byte.
The NTFS file system uses a redundancy toward the end of the drive to store a copy of the MFT.

With foresics and a decent understanding of a MBR and Hexadecimal you can detail down and see if the drive is cloned , formated(and how many times), or was clean install. The MBR cloned from the array will see no data on the new drive and clone fine. if data is present sometimes the data is not transfered if data is present.

have cloned many the array to single drives and I do use acronis. I like it the best for ease of use. but I have seen it fail because the MBR is not cleared...

I have tested and filled a MBR record with a NULL type hexadecimal number and then copied a MBR to the drive

then I broke it down byte for byte. to truly understand frustration and lack of sleep I had to write a paper of my results....man am I happy those days are long gone

floppy drives and harddrives use the same address schemes

and I am a firm believer of the almighty ZERO.
powermax works great

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Maxtor_Powermax_d1386.html

 

[cdogg]

Haven't tried Powermax - I may need to check that one out. But I can say that MBRWizard comes with a lot of options including the option to "[blue]Delete MBR, or Wipe all sectors on first head[/blue]".

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[firewolfrl]

Cdogg,
What I like about Powermax is the fact that it zeros the MBR then it goes to the end of the drive and zeros the NTFS MFT copy (this also contains a copy of the MBR)

It's too bad that Powermax is no more now that Seagate has taken over Maxtor....I have not tested it yet but Seatools is supposed to now have the zero out features. it was very lacking in earlier versions.

 

[wahnula]

Ummm...how about Ghost 2003, Drive Image or even the free HDClone?

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

I have done EXACTLY what you are trying to do with Ghost 2003.

Alternatively place the PATA drive in a USB enclosure for the clone. I have always had trouble with Acronis going from array to single disk and back.

For a wipe tool can't beat DBAN

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Tony

 

[kmcferrin]

Firewolfrl, thanks for going back and giving a more detailed explanation. You too Cdogg, that makes more sense.

I'm not sure what the problem ultimately was, but I did eventually reach my end goal. First I tried simply unplugging the array to see if it would boot from the PATA, but no go. Then I managed to get a Windows CD to boot and tried a FIXMBR from the recovery console. It actually warned me that there was something amiss with the MBR, but it still didn't resolve the issue. Then I tried using MBRWizard to copy the MBR, but that didn't work either.

So next I tried doing the plain XP install to the PATA then using DriveCopy XML as suggested, but it wouldn't let me overwrite the PATA drive since that was the boot drive. So I plugged in the SATA array again and tried to boot into that installation to use DriveCopy, but I started getting BSODs at the logon screen.

At this point I'm thinking that my drives are toast, so as a last ditch effort I booted back into the PATA plain vanilla XP install and installed Acronis, then tried to clone from the SATA to the PATA while booting from the PATA. And for some reason that makes little sense to me, that ended up working.

Maybe it was the MBR. Maybe it was solar flares. I have no idea at this point, but I know that it's working and I now have both systems up and running.

 

[firewolfrl]

Oh Man! I hate solar flares. cool to watch though....lol
glad to hear its working now