Replacement Hard Drive Arrived: RAID 1 or Cloning?

Hello friends,

I just got my replacement harddrive from dell today, and i seem to have to return my current harddrive in ten days.

THere's no way I'll want to copy everything manually from my old HD to the new HD, and let alone reinstall Windows onto the new drive!

So I reached the step to duplicate two drives, and figured two ways:

1. I got Acronis True Image, which I can use to clone my current drive onto the new one.
2. Set them into RAID 1 and let the RAID take care of all.

It's when I finished putting second HD into the laptop that problem got into me. I don't know how to setup a RAID ;( This is my first time btw. I went into BIOS and changed AHCI to RAID, and then in RAID CONFIGURATION I enabled SATA port 0 and port 3 (the only two ports shown.) and then exit saving changes.

Now the laptops reboots, i pressed f10 to enter "MediaShield BIOS - Define a New Array". From here, I can choose RAID mode to be Mirrored or Striped. Below, there's "Free Disks" on the left and "Array Disks" to the right. I originally have WD and the new HD was Toshiba.

I hope the description was clear enough. Here is my confusions:

1. If I want to use Acronis to clone HDs, should I choose RAID 0 (Striped)? And then get into windows to do so? Or will this automatically relocate some files on the WD currently into Toshiba which means both harddrives will be used after I enter Windows thus I can no longer to clone drives anymore?

2. If I want to just use RAID 0 and choose Mirrored RAID mode, will that be equal to drive cloning using Acronis? If so, should I put WD (original drive) under Free Disks section and Toshiba (new drive) under Array Disks section? Or the opposite?

I always felt challanging asking a somewhat complicated question cause my English is not very good and I am afraid that you guys won't understand my description So hope I didn't mess up this time, and any help would be really really appreciated!

I just added two pictures to make up for my poor description:

 

Your English is just fine! To answer your question you definitely can't set up a Raid 0 and do what you want to do, you can't set up a Raid 1 for that matter. If you want to clone one hard drive to the next and then take one of the drives away you will have to use Acronis. Any time you set up Raid it erases all data currently on the drives, and in a Raid setup once it's there you can't go back to running a single drive. Hope this helps

 

Thank god!!!! There were times that I almost pressed that button and try to set up a RAID!!!

So from what I understood thanks to your quick answer, no matter if I set it to RAID 0 or RAID 1, even my old drive will be erased immediately? So RAID has to be used at the very beginning when there is nothing important on either hard drives, right?

Again, thanks for your quick reply, saved me from a tremendous tragedy, as I only backed up my important files a 7 months ago ;p

p.s. so how would you recommend using Acronis in this case? Clone the current HD to a image and store it to some external harddrive?

 

Raid anything will do a 100% wipe of all data contained on both drives and leave you with a clean format to do a new install of your OS. Yeah you're right, the raid is best to set up either from the factory, or the second you get it before anything else is done. Acronis is something you'd have to ask someone else about as I have never used it, I did a clean install so I could install what I wanted and leave what I didn't want off for a faster system. But yes I believe Acronis allows you to clone an image to another drive, but I don't know the exact steps.

 

Alright, clone in process ;D

Big thanks to you for saving me anyway. If you had posted 10 minutes later, I would have been punching myself right now lol.

Off topic, I hope I could get a R2 replacement in the near future. The freezing issue on M17x never ended, and this replacement hard drive was delivered as one of Dell's solution, while I am pretty sure this won't solve the random freezing issue. I can't be sure that a R2 replacement will not have this issue, but at least I'll feel better after bearing with some random 5-to-15 minute freezing for 7 months!

 

Your welcome, I hope they get it fixed up for ya! If you need any help just hop on over to the Replacement thread on the main AW forum page. There's a lot of good people in there that will help you out! And just a forewarning you may want to buy an external hard drive to make an image of your current drive and also back up important data outside of the image, if AW thinks the freezing is hard drive related the next step is them making you do a full clean wipe and install! Just saying from experience.

 

Thanks for the advice. I'll start backup/imaging from now on, just got Acronis last week and found it was a great software today. The clone has been done

 

I'm running on the new HD right now.

Everything was the same (amazing cuz this is my first time) except for that everything seems to be running a little bit slower, idk if this could be due to that the system is adapting to the new HD...

Startup takes more time too...

 

I believe with the intel matrix storage manager you can add another harddrive and create a raid 1 (redundancy) array. You don't need to start fresh or reformat, it will simply build the array upon your existing single harddrive. Just keep in mind you need two identical drives.

And acronis is very simple to use. You can clone from the source drive to a destination drive each of different size so long as the destination drive is big enough to fit the content of the source drive.

Acronis is the safest, easiest way to complete your objective.

Raid migration:
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-029274.htm

Raid-ready system:
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-016585.htm

And I believe the m17x support these features. If not, good thing you have acronis!

 

When I set up my Raid array recently both Raid 0 and Raid 1 options stated in very large bold letters that all data would be removed and completely lost once the process had started. Only other problem with the idea on those links is that he stated he doesn't have an R2, meaning it's an R1 running a Nvidia chipset that doesn't support that feature. The drive would have been wiped clean.

 

Thanks guys I'ma test the new drive out for several days and then return the original drive to be safe. Everything runs fine as of now, except for the frist time I started the computer, the gadgets on the desktop did not show up completely. I had to quick sidebar process and restore them all to have all gadgets showed up. Could this be due to some loss of the sectors during the drive clone?