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I'm using the Intel SATA RAID Controller built into my motherboard.

I'm using it in RAID 0 mode with two 1TB Samsung HD103SJ drives.

One of the Samsung drives is reporting an error.

On the same controller I have a single 2TB Western Digital WD20EZRX drive.

Is it possible to transfer the Windows 7 installation from the RAID 0 array to the single drive?

I have a lot of programs installed that I use every day and I prefer not to go through the process of reinstalling Windows and all the applications.

Thanks in advance, P.

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  • Just use standard windows backup to some another HDD and restore it to the 2Tb drive
    – Alex
    Feb 8, 2017 at 23:45
  • Will Windows Backup work if there are errors on the drive?
    – Dutch2
    Feb 9, 2017 at 22:48
  • If there are errors you may try to fix it before backup. Use live CD with utilities like mhdd, victoria, HDDregenerator that can force firmware of HDD to remap bad sectors. It isn't a full feature fix and hdd need to be replaced, but at least you will get rid of errors.
    – Alex
    Feb 9, 2017 at 23:03

1 Answer 1

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  1. Make sure there's nothing on the 2TB disk that you want to keep (or back it up if there is); this process will erase all data currently on that disk.
  2. Create yourself a bootable Linux live disk (for example, Knoppix or SystemRescueCD)
  3. Boot your computer from that disk, not from the hard disk (if your computer has no optical drive, you should be able to make this work using a flashdrive too).
  4. Open a terminal (Konsole or xterm or anything like that) and run the following command: ls -l /dev/sd*.
  5. You should see at least two drives, sda and sdb (ignore any results with numbers, like sda1); these are your (logical) hard disks.
  6. Use the mount command to make sure neither disk is mounted; if either is, use the umount command to unmount it/them.
  7. Make sure you have identified correctly which one is which, and that the RAID0 "disk" is the same size as or smaller than the non-striped target disk.
  8. Use the dd command to duplicate the RAID0 logical disk to the 2TB target disk (dd is old and has slightly funky syntax, but the command you want will look something like this: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4M).
  9. Shut the computer down and remove the RAID array.
  10. Boot the computer up (making sure it's set up to boot from the 2TB disk, if it wasn't before) and it should boot into Windows just like before (except maybe a little slower, because no striping).

The reason this works is that since your disks are striped at the hardware level, the OS (Windows or Linux) sees the RAID0 array and the 2TB disk both simply as 2TB disks. So, you're just cloning one disk to the other, then removing the bad one so your computer boots from the good one. This could be done using fancy (and often expensive) cloning tools, but good old dd does the job just fine, and can be obtained by picking up a free Linux live CD.

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  • I booted from SystemRescueCD. The two drives in the RAID array, /dev/sda and /dev/sdc, show up as separate drives. Scrolling back I noticed a /dev/md/Main and a /dev/md/imsm0 mentioning RAID. I tried to mount either to verify the content but was unable to.
    – Dutch2
    Feb 9, 2017 at 22:46

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