RAID and backup - Free macrium etc

Hi there
If you are using RAID can you recommend any Windows programs that allow you to add RAID driver when you boot from stand alone device.

The Non Free version of Macrium can do --"Technicians USB" but this is actually quite expensive.
There's a couple of Linux stand alone programs that do this but it would be nice if something like Free Macrium could be "Hobbled" to load the RAID drivers.

Any ideas / suggestions here -- I'm surely not the only one using RAID on Windows.

Cheers
jimbo

I have never tried a software driven raid environment only hardware based ones which have no issues since its hardware based, but With any of the backup products, TrueImage, Macrum, Amoei, etc, the normal procedure is to create your backups under windows thus using the software raid environment. It creates an image of what windows sees on your disk. In the event of a failure, restore the backup image using the standalone environment provided by the software used. Boot windows and re-build your raid environment. You may or may not be able to accomplish that.

storageman said:

I have never tried a software driven raid environment only hardware based ones which have no issues since its hardware based, but With any of the backup products, TrueImage, Macrum, Amoei, etc, the normal procedure is to create your backups under windows thus using the software raid environment. It creates an image of what windows sees on your disk. In the event of a failure, restore the backup image using the standalone environment provided by the software used. Boot windows and re-build your raid environment. You may or may not be able to accomplish that.

Hi there

For pure hardware RAID that's fine as the RAID environment is set up via BIOS / controller chip so drivers are loaded BEFORE the OS gets loaded and boots so the OS sees the HDD's as RAID at boot.

I have an HP Proliant Gen 8 server which has the RAID on a "Virtual" Card - At Windows (or Linux) install time you load the driver one time so the OS at install time incorporates the RAID driver into it and after the OS is installed it then sees the HDD's in the RAID configuration. You only need to install the RAID driver once at the initial OS install time --both Linux and Windows have perfectly OK methods for adding your own drivers when you install the OS.

It's a sort of "HYBRID" RAID drive --some I think call it "Fake" RAID. The RAID controller does initialize in the server at boot but the driver still needs to be in the target OS otherwise you just see all the HDD's as discrete HDD's and not in their RAID configuration.

Macrium Free used to have a Linux based bootable version - then it was easy to add the driver in a kernel start up parameter pointing to say an extra USB device where your driver was located. The current version is based on Windows PE so I'm not sure if you can do this at boot - and it's too late after boot as the wrong HDD configuuration is detected. It seems that the way perhaps to create this would be do create the Winpe environment from within Windows but I'm not sure how to do this.

Simply backing up the Windows HDD would give problems on stand alone restore as the restore program is the one that has to know about the RAID HDD's at boot - that's why IT needs the drivers loaded too.

Any suggestions. I was thinking of perhaps trying CLONEZILLA as it has RAID in it but not sure if it is OK with Windows partitions. Also CLONEZILLA clones rather than images HDD's.

Cheers
jimbo

After checking, I've noticed that you can add necessary drivers to the Macrum PE build. When you boot from the PE disc, it should load the desired drivers. I've done this on my old Win 7 system. I added USB 3.0 support via a card. I included the drivers for that card in my PE build and when I boot from the PE disc, It sees the USB 3.0 ports.