This is what I want to do

[Sinster]

I have 3 HDD
1.) 200 GB SATA
2.) 160 GB SATA
3.) 320 GB SATA II

I want to use 1 & 2 to raid 0.. I know I'm going to loose approx 40 gb but thats doesn't bother me because I have 320 GB to take is place

In the past I would of just reformatted and be done with it. Of course if I want to go raid I'm going have to reformat. The problem I'm going to have is that I want to keep a lot of my stuff thats on my computer now. I have stuff such as my wife iTunes on here and really don't want to lose any of her paid tunes and other stuff that I would like to keep. I would like to keep my games without having to reinstall so it reinstall back in the registry.

My question is whats the best way of keeping what I want and to be able to recover later. Will Nortons Ghost work?

 

[ElementalDragon]

as far as i know you can't set up a RAID array with in-equally sized hard drives. Yes.... you could partition the first one to 160GB..... but the way RAID works is going sector by sector on hard drives that are basically a mirror image of each-other. as the hard drives are of different maximum capacities, the layout of the sectors of the hard drive platters are different between the two. Typically, when setting up a RAID array, it's best to find the exact same size hard drive, and if at all possible, the exact same model. RAID is a very picky subject.

 

[Brad]

not gonna happen.

 

[LeeJend]

You can use the 2 unequal drive sizes. Just set it up as the size of the smallest as you said.

Before doing anything backup those music and video liscences, email files, setup files, links etc.. There is a directory under my documents. Use help to find out what it is, my memory is failing.

Now assuming your system disk is one of the smaller ones you need to create a boot partition on the 320 and image the boot drive to the 320 gig boot partition and copy the contents of the other drive to the 320 also. This can not be done in Windows. It requires the drive utility disk or something like Ghost.

Once you have imaged the system to the 320 pull the other drives and boot to the 320. If it boots and finds everything you can now reformat the 160/200 and set up your raid.

I don't use raid so here it gets hard. I don't know if you can image from the 320 to the RAID array. It is doubtful but someone else may know how to do it. If you can't image to a raid then you won't be able to run the system from the fast array without re-installing everything. If there is a way to image to a raid array then you can just image the 320 boot partition to the raid. You may have to tweak some partition letters or program start icon properties depending how the partitions fall out.