Windows 7 Striping two drives.

[Z4KJ0N3S]

So, I'm completely out of disc space on my C: drive. It's a 40GB IDE drive. To compensate, I've installed a 110GB SATA drive, which my computer recognizes as drive E:.

I'm trying to stripe these drives (Or get Windows to freely write data across both of them as if they were a single drive.), which, I think, is called RAID 0. But I dunno.

If someone could assist me, I would love them forever.

Thanks!

 

[mike2k9]

your drives need to be the same size (although may not be true anymore) you would have to set up the raid prior to installing the OS.

You can buy 2 more drives and setup the raid on those if you wanted and leave the 40GB drive alone

 

[Highwayman]

I concure, the drives should be of the same size, however theres extra modes available now raid 5 & 10 which allow some more useful functions aside from performance. One thing to remember with Raid 0 is if data corrupts on either drive all the data will be lost and likely unrecoverable, requiring a format to fix. To be honest the performance gained isnt worth the extra hassle, I tried raid 0 for a few months for gaming purposes and all it help was loading times which thanks to sata2 where already fast anyway.

 

[Z4KJ0N3S]

Alright then, how would I go about transfering my OS from the IDE drive to the SATA drive? I need the extra space.

 

[Z4KJ0N3S]

*bump*

Guys, I'm quite rapidly running out of space.

I could use the help.

 

[mike2k9]

There may be a way to image your drive as it is and then restore it to the new drive (or drives if you setup the Raid). I have never done this myself, so I couldn't point you to any reputable software to do the job. Perhaps someone else could......anyone?

 

[SnowDog]

This sounds like 'ring around the rosy' - I'd procure a standard 250G + HD. What you want to do is work hard for minimal payoff. Save yourself the grief.

 

[Z4KJ0N3S]

I assume there's stuff on the drive that I can't just Copy/Paste to the new one, right?

I've ghosted drives before, but meh. I'm obviously running Windows 7, which will be done for in a while..

Maybe I should install XP on the other drive and make that my primary? I do believe that that may be a better answer. (Man, I haven't run XP in like, 3 years. )

Think I should do that instead?

I am kind of leaning towards doing that.

**EDIT**

SnowDog, I'm getting A+ certified soon, so I want to do things the hard way for a while, just so I can know how to do it.

 

[jeradw]

What about creating a system image and then restoring from it?

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Backup and Restore.

I wonder during the install process of Windows 7 if you can restore from that image? Any thoughts on that, guys?
You could always save the image to another drive, dvds, or something else.

OR...you could transfer all of your stuff to the new drive, wipe Windows 7 and reinstall it just on the 40GB drive (that would be your OS drive) and the other one could be your drive for games, music...etc. Does that make sense?

 

[Tepid]

The problem with imaging drives is.... not all imaging software will let you take an image from one drive and restore it to another that is not of the same size, definitely not smaller, and some won't let you do larger.

But, That should generally be ok, if the drive is larger and running Vista or 7.

Image the 40G with Acronis or DIXML (free, but needs BartPE or UBCD to do the restore unless you have a second PC.)
Acronis is better in this regard as you can create a bootable Acronis Recovery Disk.
The new drive should not have a partition I believe. It should be a clean drive. It has been a while since I played with this and so I am going off of vague memory. But I believe I made this work.

When you are done restoring, you may only have a 40G partition on the new drive.
Restore the image to the larger new drive, boot into Vista/7 and extend the partition in Disk Management to the size you want, you should be able to create multiple partitions at this point if desired.

Next option.....

USMT 4.0 - (User State Migration Tool)

Or might be better to use Windows Settings and Transfer Wizard