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5266
March 14th, 2014 17:00
System restore to T5600 RAID 1 via PERC H310
I have a T5600 with a single 500G SATA drive on the PERC 310. I had a second 500 G drive, so I decided to try to make a RAID. I made a full backup with system image to an external USB drive, have a rescue CD, so what could go wrong? Booted with cmd-R, created a virtual drive from the 2 disks, and initialized. I can find the system image on the USB drive, but when I try to restore, it can't find the new virtual drive to restore to. If I try to install W7 from the DVD, it doesn't find the drive either. What am I doing wrong?
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Jeff Mandel
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March 18th, 2014 18:00
After considerable research, I have discovered the answer. Moving from JBOD to Raid 1 trivially decreases the size of the partition, which is enough to make a restore fail. The solution is to reduce the size of the partition prior to conversion to RAID, then image the volume, make the RAID, initialize, restore, and expand. Installing Windows from the original DVD requires loading the 64 bit driver for the PERC; suggestions to use the 32 bit version didn't work.
I got a good deal on a WD 3 Tb USB3 drive, which I used for my system image. I neglected to create a new Rescue disk after installing the drive, so each and every time I rebooted (at least 30) I had to load drivers from a thumb drive. Having a newer rescue CD would have helped. It probably is worth the trouble to build a rescue disk on a USB device.
I have no idea whether this is any easier in Windows 8, but I suspect not. If Dell has any useful documentation on how to perform this task, I certainly couldn't find it. The lack of interest on the part of Dell employees in problems posted on this forum stands in contrast with that of Apple employees, who generally respond immediately to postings in their forums.