karma

HI All,
I have question about something I have never tried. My new home brew Vista system is running two 500gB SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration. My new MB only has one PATA port which I am using for CD and DVD drives.

My old XP drives still work and are sitting on a shelf. There are some files that I thought I had tranferred to the the new drives but I guess I didn't. I want to get them back.

My scheme is to disconnect the optical drives and plug in the old PATA drive. when I start the machine what can I expect? The old drive is a bootable XP disk but I don't want to boot from it.

I hope the machine will boot from the Vista disk and then find the PATA drive as new hardware and install the driver. Then maybe I can see the drive in Windows Explorer. If so, I should be able to simply drag the files over to the RAID drives and be done with it. Then I'll return to the original configuration with the optical drives.

Is this a realistic operation? Will there be trouble? Should I set the old PATA drive to be a slave? It will be the only device on the ATA bus.

Thanks, Sparky

StrangleHold

Should work fine. Just hook up the IDE as a slave or it might try to boot to it set as master on the IDE channel depending on how the bios is setup.

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Sir Travis D

Yes, that would seem to work.

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Quick69GTO

I would put it in a external 3.5 USB enclosure.
Instant backup drive.

karma

HI,
Well, well, it sounds like my scheme is sound. Amazing!! Have any of you actually done this?

Quick, you have a good idea and I mignt give it a try. But I already have two 150gB USB external drives that I use for backing up my photo and music archives. Maybe I'll do it when these fill up. It is a shame to waste them. However, I don't trust hard drives at all. That's why I have RAID 1 on my Vista system. The XP drives are about 3 years old with pretty heavy use. When, not if, will they fail? That is the question, right?

Sparky

karma

HI All,
First, thanks for your replies. Let me tell you how it went.

The operation was successful. All desired files and folders on the XP disk were found, moved, and are now accessable on Vista. But the operation did not go exactly as planned.

I arranged the disks exactly as described above. But the system booted off the XP disk despite that I had set it as a Slave. This is not what I wanted because I was not sure how the RAID controller would react due to the fact that the XP drive was never in a RAID array. However, after boot, the Data Protection notification came up and said that data was being protected from a single disk failure. This is normal and indicates the RAID controller understood the current drive environment. It appeared that RAID was working independent of XP. The XP disk was not in the array; only the original 500mB drives were in the array. In other words, RAID seemed to be working properly.

Rather than forcing the machine to boot from Vista, I let the boot process continue. As you might guess, every program that could be updated via the WEB got updated. You know, XP, Java, Norton, etc. This took about a half an hour. I did not interrupt it.

Once XP stopped groussing about new hardware and updates I started My Computer to see which drives were available. They were all there including the RAID pair which was assigned as F:. C: was the XP boot disk. Drive sizes and utilization were reported accurately. Things were looking good. The Disk Manager reported the same.

I went into Windows Explorer and found all the XP disk files I wanted to move and all the Vista directories on F:. I created a new folder on the F: Desktop to receive the moved files and folders and started moving data. The operation went without a glitch.

When I finished, I shut the machine down and returned to the original hardware configuration with the optical drives installed. Then I booted Vista. Things went normally until the login window appeared. I logged in. At that point the process slowed down. It seemed that maybe some registry values had changed and Vista was instigating a repair. Whatever, the proces continued until finished.

Vista is now running normally as are all the applications I have tried. The moved files and folders are available as though they had been there all the time.

In short, the operation was a rousing success eventhough it did not happen exactly as I expected. I suspect I could have forced Vista to boot by playing with the boot priorities in the bios. I would have done this if I had problems. But I didn't need to.

Thanks Again, Sparky

Edited to add:
I just noticed something interesting. When I returned back to Vista the clock was an hour off. It was correct before I started playing around this morning. Apparently, the XP drive was last used before Daylight Savings Time came into effect and it reset the clock. It did not reset back when I returned to Vista. It is now corrected. Does this explanation make sense?? I thought the clock was a bios function that would not react to which OS was in effect.