I have been having some problems with my RAID 5 array on my desktop. Every couple of weeks I turn the PC on in the morning and it decides that it needs to rebuild itself. This takes 8 or 9 hours and leaves the PC all but unusable duiring this time. Since a RAID array is supposed to help me out rather than hinder me, I decided it was time for it to go.
I am running Vista Ultimate 64 bit (which is much faster than the 32 bit version). I decided to the the Complete PC Backup utility to back up the computer and then I would restore it. I had 4 160Gb disks in the RAID array and four drive letters striped across all four disks (c, d, e, f). I intended to create a backup image and then restore the drive letters to individual disks rather than use a RAID array.
Oh bugger. As it turns out, the Complete PC Restore utility will only let you restore to the same number of volumes that you backed up from (i.e. 1). Sigh... This was a problem because my data was larger than 160Gb. Luckily, I had a 1Tb disk lying around, so I swapped out one of the old 160Gb disks and put in the new 1Tb disk. Happy days! Nearly... This next bit will save you a sleepless night one day!!!!
As soon as the restore started I got an error message "Element Not Found 0x80070490". This is not the most helpful error message I have ever seen. I did some Googling (in a panic I must admit) and discovered a strange quirk of the restore utility. For it to work, you must do 2 things:
- Ensure that the boot order in your BIOS is CD-ROM followed by the disk you are restoring to
- Do not connect the USB hard disc you are restoring from until just before the restore utility scans the available disks for backups
Always check your boot order before a restore. You are likely to have changed hard discs if you are doing a restore which means the boot order in your BIOS is likely to have changed too.
What a crazy world we live in...