About to REVIEW the Dell Precision M6400...NEED A LOT OF HELP

Hey adoniteking...quick question about your RAID experience. Did you end up with only 1 partition on the RAID volume or did you put the Dell utility partition on there too?

I'm trying to take a Ghost image of my factory single drive setup and restore it to the new 320x2 7200 rpm setup. The "ghosting" appears to have worked but now when I try to boot it just hangs after displaying the Intel Matrix information...where it says Press Ctrl-I to enter the RAID setup (or something like that). Any thoughts on that? Thanks much!

 

I ended up with one partition. I backed up dell's utility partition but i havent been able to put it on my RAID setup.
During my windows installation, I tried several times to split the single partition into 2 or more but i wasnt able to do so. I feel the RAID config on this system has to be done by dell engineers because he RAID setup that intel matrix provides seems to be a tricky one.
There was a discussion about this in the main thread(read next couple of pages). I will suggest you do a fresh install of windows onto the system after setting up your RAID and then pick out the files you need from the backup.
Of course this means that you wouldnt be able to migrate your personal settings for software etc and will have to re-install each one.

Well i hope that sorta helps.

 

I don't have the system in front of me, but Intel's Matrix manager should be able to expand your current one-drive setup into a 2-drive RAID configuration, without any intermediate imaging/restoring steps. This is definitely true for a RAID-1 setup, but should also be possible for RAID-0.

On the other hand, just ghosting a single-drive setup into a RAID setup might create what Intel's Raid manager sees as a corrupt RAID volume, since it misses some of the configuration information necessary for RAID operation, so that's not going to work. Of course, the problem may just be due to the usual low quality of Symantec software, which is why I use Acronis...

P.S.: I just checked the documentation, and it looks like the OS uses a special RAID driver to access the array, which may mean that you cannot simply transfer the non-RAID image to a RAID array (well, at least not with Ghost, if you have Acronis with the Universal Restore option this can be done) because your image uses an inappropriate HAL. In any case, the documentation contains instructions on how to create the RAID-1 array you want; see Chapter 8: RAID migration. Just RTFM...

 

Thanks Pirx...that was just the kick in the pants that I needed. I'm embarrassed to report how easy that was.

I switched from a single 160GBdrive to dual 320GB drives in RAID 0. I Ghosted the 160GB to an external drive, removed the 160GB and installed two 320GB drives, restored the Ghost image to the first 320GB drive, then booted from the Vista CD to repair the boot record and such. Lastly, after a successful boot from the 320GB, I used the Matrix manager to expand the current one-drive setup to RAID 0. Piece-o-cake! Way easier than I thought it would be.

Thanks again for the tip.

 

Ghost means Norton Ghost right? Im thinking of doing the same setup so if thats the case ill have to get hold of that.

And Matrix manager is that something that comes with the m6400 or do I have to buy that also?

Thanks - sorry for the uninteresting addition

 

Yes, I used Norton Ghost but had to buy the new version that is Vista-64compatible. Vista wouldn't even allow older versions of Ghost to install.

The Intel Matrix software was installed on my laptop even though I ordered it with only one drive. The SATA setup in BIOS was also set for RAID even though it was a single drive setup. So, having the system already setup for RAID really contributed to the ease of converting from a single drive system to RAID 0.

After restoring the Norton Ghost image to my first 320GB drive and establishing a clean boot I went into Intel Matrix software and followed the steps in chapter 8 (see Pirx's link) to extend my setup to RAID-0. It took a couple of hours to span the drives but I was amazed that the system was completely operable during the spanning process. It's been awhile since I've setup a RAID system so I was expecting a lot more of a headache. All of these new fandangled systems are totally awesome! I was just too lazy to realize it.