splitting up a raid array

[ajbird 0]

Hi folks,

 

I have striped raid array consisting of 2x60 gig maxtor hdds

 

the raid performance is dreadful and is slowing the system down to a crawl (the highpoint raid conroller that seems to be slowing everyone else down) i have troubleshooted this to death and have decided to give up (the thing went like a rocket after a fresh install of XP but speed has dwindled as the disk have started to fill up)

 

so i want to split the array up and go back to haveing 2 x 60 gig hdds

 

so i figure -

1) borrow 2x40 gig hdds

2) copy 40 gig of ducuments and downloads off the array to 1 disk which brought the program files / xp installation down beloew 34 gig

3) resize xp partition to 35 gig - copy the raid partition to the other 40 gig disk using the copy mechanism in partition magic

4) un plug raid to make sure all works - plug new xp boot disk into ide chain and switch on

5) boot off xp cd and goto recovery console - run bootcfg and tell XP that it is going to boot of this disk from now on.

 

and thats where things went wrong - it refuses to make a boot.ini or make the disk bootable - it simply says that it cannot do that - it detects the windows installation but will not create a boot.ini

 

iff try to rebuild the mbr it tells me that this is not a standard mbr am i sure - i say yes and it seems to rebuild ok but will still not create the boot info. - it looks to me that the xp equivalent of sys c: is required but not sure how xp handles such things?

 

i am now stuck.

 

Help me .......

 

is there a better way to split the array and not lose the data? or is my cloned raid array never going to boot? i have the 2nd disk - can i make this the boot disk - it does not seem to want to do this?

 

i really want to avoid starting my xp setup again......

 

incidently - i have never managed to get the computer to boot off the raid array and have relied on a old 15 gig hdd to boot off - this is dying and i fear it will not last much longer hence the prompt to get things fixed.

 

thanks

 

andy

[Tomay 0]

Maybe norton ghost would be a better solution, but I don't think that's the problem.

 

Did you try fixboot beside fixmbr?

[ajbird 0]

it says something about - could not find system disk - which is what makes me think i need the equivalent to sys c: as in the good old days.

[Tomay 0]

Try to repair the windows installation.

[ajbird 0]

err how?

 

just reinstall windows over the top of it?

 

will that not destroy my reg?

[Tomay 0]

No not reinstall. Just boot from your windows cd and at one point you can select if you want to repair an installation or setup a new one.

[ajbird 0]

i think you need a floppy disk prepared for that and err well, a hum.. I dont!

 

bugger

[lt_frank_castle 0]

I have a highpoint raid controller on my abit motherboard running a striped array. "Slowing down" has not occured for me. Honestly, it runs like a raped ape.

 

I have to 80 gig maxtors with 8 meg cache on each. I built the striped array with the bios config.

 

Before installing xp, I used partition magic and split my 160 gig partition into the following chucks.

20 gig/

20 gig/

80 gig/

20 gig/

 

This allows me to keep my c drive (O/S) to a small size, that I ghost over the network using ghost corp edition. I also defrag on an often basis, and have had very good performance. Hope this helps.

 

Sidenote, the only thing I found hardware wise that doesn't play with my p4 abit board is the "intel application accelerator". It down right slayed my machine, so I reinstalled my last image of ghost.

[lt_frank_castle 0]

The Intel App accel. is a software program, not hardware. But it really destroyed my performance.

[ajbird 0]

cheers for the help guys

 

have given up and started to rebuild the pc from scratch - arghh

 

bloody hell i forget every time how painful it is to get this thing to the point where it is useful.

 

nightmare

 

thanks

[lt_frank_castle 0]

Norton's ghost is the shit. Reinstall image. Reboot. Done.

 

Get your "base" system working, O/S, drivers, all crucial software and create a base image. Something to fall back when all hell breaks loose. I keep incremental ghost images as well.