splitting up a raid array

Hi folks,

I have striped raid array consisting of 2x60 gig maxtor hdds

the raid performance is dreadful and is slowing the system down to a crawl (the highpoint raid conroller that seems to be slowing everyone else down) i have troubleshooted this to death and have decided to give up (the thing went like a rocket after a fresh install of XP but speed has dwindled as the disk have started to fill up)

so i want to split the array up and go back to haveing 2 x 60 gig hdds

so i figure -
1) borrow 2x40 gig hdds
2) copy 40 gig of ducuments and downloads off the array to 1 disk which brought the program files / xp installation down beloew 34 gig
3) resize xp partition to 35 gig - copy the raid partition to the other 40 gig disk using the copy mechanism in partition magic
4) un plug raid to make sure all works - plug new xp boot disk into ide chain and switch on
5) boot off xp cd and goto recovery console - run bootcfg and tell XP that it is going to boot of this disk from now on.

and thats where things went wrong - it refuses to make a boot.ini or make the disk bootable - it simply says that it cannot do that - it detects the windows installation but will not create a boot.ini

iff try to rebuild the mbr it tells me that this is not a standard mbr am i sure - i say yes and it seems to rebuild ok but will still not create the boot info. - it looks to me that the xp equivalent of sys c: is required but not sure how xp handles such things?

i am now stuck.

Help me .......

is there a better way to split the array and not lose the data? or is my cloned raid array never going to boot? i have the 2nd disk - can i make this the boot disk - it does not seem to want to do this?

i really want to avoid starting my xp setup again......

incidently - i have never managed to get the computer to boot off the raid array and have relied on a old 15 gig hdd to boot off - this is dying and i fear it will not last much longer hence the prompt to get things fixed.

thanks

andy

Maybe norton ghost would be a better solution, but I don't think that's the problem.

Did you try fixboot beside fixmbr?

it says something about - could not find system disk - which is what makes me think i need the equivalent to sys c: as in the good old days.

Try to repair the windows installation.

err how?

just reinstall windows over the top of it?

will that not destroy my reg?

No not reinstall. Just boot from your windows cd and at one point you can select if you want to repair an installation or setup a new one.

i think you need a floppy disk prepared for that and err well, a hum.. I dont!

bugger

I have a highpoint raid controller on my abit motherboard running a striped array. "Slowing down" has not occured for me. Honestly, it runs like a raped ape.

I have to 80 gig maxtors with 8 meg cache on each. I built the striped array with the bios config.

Before installing xp, I used partition magic and split my 160 gig partition into the following chucks.
20 gig/
20 gig/
80 gig/
20 gig/

This allows me to keep my c drive (O/S) to a small size, that I ghost over the network using ghost corp edition. I also defrag on an often basis, and have had very good performance. Hope this helps.

Sidenote, the only thing I found hardware wise that doesn't play with my p4 abit board is the "intel application accelerator". It down right slayed my machine, so I reinstalled my last image of ghost.

The Intel App accel. is a software program, not hardware. But it really destroyed my performance.

cheers for the help guys

have given up and started to rebuild the pc from scratch - arghh

bloody hell i forget every time how painful it is to get this thing to the point where it is useful.

nightmare

thanks

Norton's ghost is the shit. Reinstall image. Reboot. Done.

Get your "base" system working, O/S, drivers, all crucial software and create a base image. Something to fall back when all hell breaks loose. I keep incremental ghost images as well.