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I recently purchased a WD 1.5TB hdd for my Desktop. About 2 hours into its use in my PC it burnt out. I sen this back to the nice folks at overclockers.co.uk and 2 weeks later (blame the UK postal strike) it arrived and was promptly replaced. So the new drive arrived and 24 hours later i deem it working OK. However with my current rig i have 1 x 160 GB SATA, and 3 x 1TB SATA. The 3 x 1TB drives are in a RAID 5 configuration. No more data loss for me. Recently my gaming habits have pushed my 160GB drive to capacity. So i figure its time to try Windows 7 Built in Backup and Restore.
Start ->Â backup. Simple eh?
Select the Library and Local Disk, also tick include a system image.
Now to the scary part. Installing the new HDD in the Antec 900 was easy and a prompt reboot and boot to DVD brought up the Recovery disk. This restore process detected my backup and offered to restore it. My fear of losing my raid array made me chose the custom route. However this was not necessary as the drive restore stated that the RAID would be excluded from the backup as it was the location of the backup media. My fears however were not alleviated as i found in the past with Microsoft that sometimes they mess up the simplest wording of an action.
20 Mins later and the PC had booted into Windows 7. As it uses an image level backup my HDD was showing as 160GB. Thankfully microsoft were smart enough to remove the need for Partition Magic and other partitioning software and i was able to “expand disk” while windows was still running. No reboot needed at this point and no re-activation of windows.
Some benchmark tests will follow once i get my SSD’s up and running.
hdd · overclockers · raid · sata · windows 7
