Home AOMEI Products Support

Only Available Drive is External Hard Drive

I recently tried to restore my system drive in Windows XP. I have no problem selecting the source image file, which is on an external hard drive. However, when I try to select a destination, the only drive available is the source of the image file, which is that same external drive and it is labeled as drive C, which of course must be used by Windows as the operating system drive. I do not know why the restore process does not see my local machine's drives. I have 2 physical hard drives in a RAID 0 array. At first I used FDISK to reassign local drives C, D, and E and set C as primary, then formatted all three drives. Reflect could not see those drives during the restore process. Then I recreated my RAID 0 array from 2 physical internal drives which destroyed all partitions. I again tried to restore from the image file, but again my internal, local machine drive was not found and the only drive shown for destination was my external drive (labeled C by Reflect). My Reflect Restore CD is in the Windows PE format. Any suggestions?

Comments

  • Hello,

    I suppose the source disk you backed up is a basic (opposite dynamic) disk, so you cannot restore the backup to dynamic disk. In this case you have to restore the backup to a single basic disk.

    If you have any other qustions or suggestions please feel free to let us know.

    Best Regards,
    Kim
    AOMEI Support Team
  • The source disk is not a dynamic disk. If I understand your reply, are you saying that Backupper will not handle RAID arrayed disks? If this is so, then I would need to set my BIOS to one drive, reinstall my system image with Backupper, then try to migrate to a 2-drive RAID array. If I had another partition image of my data partition, that would need to be reinstalled to one drive before recreating my RAID array. I had thought that Windows PE could accept other drivers, such as the drivers need for my RAID hardware.
  • Hi lbullock1, that's correct. Use Backupper to create a new Win-PE Restore-CD and click the "Add Driver" Button to integrate the appropriate driver for your Raid-Controller.

    Pit
  • That's interesting, which problems can occur? I backed up a test server with Adaptec Raid with success. I did not yet try to restore it but I could browse the image and the WinPE boot media shows me the Raid with correct partitions. But I had to add the raid drivers before.

    Pit
  • It's probably because your server is using "fake" raid. True hardware raid appears to any operating system as a single drive. However some cheaper forms of hardware raid actually use the operating system as the raid controller. Server raid is usually hardware, but PC raid is cheaper, and usually "fake". That's why Windows PE could not see the raid array on your machine until you loaded the drivers for it.
  • As I wrote, Backupper itself and his WinPE show me the raid correctly, but I had to add the drivers to WinPE. Kim's post sounded to me as if there's a general problem. As you already wrote, Windows does not differ between a single disk and a hardware raid. Maybe Kim gives us an explanation next week?

    Pit
  • Hello to all,

    Sorry for the confusion. Please ignore my previous reply on this issue. I made it clear here:
    First, if AOMEI Backupper cannot recognise the Raid in windows, the hard disks may be other format other than 512bytes per sector. You could click Start--in the search box, type in Msinfo32.exe, next, select component--storage--disk, then in the right section you could find the value of sector/bytes. In this case, AOMEI Backpper doesn't support this kind of disks and RAID so far.

    Second, if AOMEI Backupper can recognise hardware Raid in windows but cannot recognise it in Winpe, you need to add the driver of your Raid controller to the Winpe, please refer to this article: http://www.disk-partition.com/forum/discussion/130/how-to-add-additional-drivers-to-aomei-backupper-winpe

    Third, once you created a backup of a recognised Raid which contains system, it cannot be boot, if you restor to a dissimilar hardware Raid.

    If you have any other qustions or suggestions please feel free to let us know.

    Best Regards,
    Kim
    AOMEI Support Team
Sign In or Register to comment.