# partitioned Raid-1 cloning



## hqnet (Nov 14, 2009)

I have a RAID-1 (mirror) setup and one of the disks is failing, 
I will be upgrading this to larger disks and, while I do have 
proper backups, I would like to clone the current installation.

Now, my question is about the cloning, when I had set up this 
system and took a snapshop of the fresh install, and restored 
it to test it would work fine. 
But at both stages, clonning and restoring, the raid was ´degraded´
and required a full consistency check which took a couple of hours.

This happened with 3 different cloning tools (acronis, clonezilla 
and ghost IIRC). I guess I was doing something wrong... 

What could that be?

Was it the fact that I built the raid, then installed and cloned 
while I should have worked on a single drive and do the mirroring 
afterwards?

what would the approach be now that one disk is offline?
Do I clone from there? 
were to? A single new drive or to a new built raid?


The system has Win 2003 server 32bits and the discs are partitioned to separate OS, Data and Paging.


Thanks n advance!
HQ


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

You really can't clone to a mirror as a clone is taking the exact copy partitions and all and trying to recreate that. And while the mirror is trying to replicate everything from one to the other drive you will have issues. Break the mirror and copy the data and then create the mirror after the data has been put on the main drive.


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## hqnet (Nov 14, 2009)

Hi Rockn,

hmm, in case it makes any difference: I should have been clearer at saying that I´d like to take a snapshot image of the OS´ partition and then restore that one to the new, larger target. I don´t intend to make a disk-to-disk clone.

Having one of the current disks marked as offline in the raid surely means the mirroring is broken already? and so I should be able to clone the good disk one to a new disk (not yet in raid, but partitioned) and THEN I should tell the raid controller´s bios to "build the raid". Is that correct?

Thank you.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

I was under the impression that offline meant the mirror had issues. Just partition up the good disk and copy and build.


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