David Shorthouse
April 19th 03, 12:38 AM
Hey folks,
For a few months now, I have been periodically cloning my system
partition (XP Pro SP1) that resides on a hardware RAID0 array onto an active
IDE partition. I naively assumed that this would protect me should I ever
get a broken stripe and need to restore.
I attempted to verify the integrity of my back-up system partition by
disabling the RAID in my BIOS and changing the boot sequence to read off the
IDE drive. To my surprise, I couldn't get past the Windows splash screen and
was presented with a dialog box explaining that Windows couldn't verify its
activation status. Oh brother. I did a bit of reading and now see that a
Windows installation is married to the hardware and it choked on the drive
it was now sitting in. BUT, if I were to re-clone the original system drive
(something I haven't yet had to do, thank goodness) using the back-up
partition on the IDE drive, would I expect to boot as before without any
activation issues?
On another note, I now see that having installed XP on a hardware RAID0
partition does little to speed up boot or overall system activity. I would
now like to clone the system partition to a regular IDE disk with a large
buffer, i.e. similar to my naive back-up procedure. Can this be done without
having to do a repair install or install from scratch?
Thanks for any input,
Dave
For a few months now, I have been periodically cloning my system
partition (XP Pro SP1) that resides on a hardware RAID0 array onto an active
IDE partition. I naively assumed that this would protect me should I ever
get a broken stripe and need to restore.
I attempted to verify the integrity of my back-up system partition by
disabling the RAID in my BIOS and changing the boot sequence to read off the
IDE drive. To my surprise, I couldn't get past the Windows splash screen and
was presented with a dialog box explaining that Windows couldn't verify its
activation status. Oh brother. I did a bit of reading and now see that a
Windows installation is married to the hardware and it choked on the drive
it was now sitting in. BUT, if I were to re-clone the original system drive
(something I haven't yet had to do, thank goodness) using the back-up
partition on the IDE drive, would I expect to boot as before without any
activation issues?
On another note, I now see that having installed XP on a hardware RAID0
partition does little to speed up boot or overall system activity. I would
now like to clone the system partition to a regular IDE disk with a large
buffer, i.e. similar to my naive back-up procedure. Can this be done without
having to do a repair install or install from scratch?
Thanks for any input,
Dave