Moving an existing Windows installation to a RAID.

Ok, so a few nights ago I decided that I absolutely had to have a raid on my OS drive. I warned my wife that I was "fixing" something that was absolutely not broken. I asked her to remind me that I chose to do this in a few hours when she started to hear the swearing coming from our den. I then proceeded to waste an hour of my life researching google links, attempting to find valid information on moving an existing, working OS from a non-raid partition to a raid partition, and still have it boot. 90% said "Can't be done", 10% offered worthless, baseless, claims on how to accomplish it, 5% were genuinely trying to help, and the last 5% was barely English or not English at all. Then I decided to just dive in and give it a go. Below is the steps I went through to successfully complete my "impossible" task.

Tools required: Acronis True Image Home 2010, USB Drive or attached drive large enough for the RAID driver and an image of your existing OS partition.

***Just a note here, backups are kind of important. I made an image of my drive with Acronis onto a usb drive and tested restoring it to a spare drive before I started. I had no desire to lose any data here, after all I was playing with fire so to speak. I highly recommend making a backup image to some external source of media just in case something goes wrong.***

1. Created and emergency rescue disc through Acronis.
2. Used Acronis to create an image of my existing Windows 7 OS partition.
3. Copied the image to drive 3 (extra internal data drive on my machine).
4. Downloaded, and copied the raid drivers to drive 3.
5. Removed the existing OS drive, installed the two new drives to be raided.
6. Enabled the on-board raid in my bios (nVidia nForce in this case)
7. Entered the RAID bios during boot and created my raid 0.
8. Inserted the Rescue disc created in step 2.
9. After the disc booted I chose the restore option (with the option to restore to not like hardware).
a. It had me select my backup image (stored on drive 3)
b. It then prompted for any additional drivers required for the os. (the raid drivers on drive 3).
c. I then had to choose my new raid drive as the destination.
10. After waiting for the restore to complete, I removed the Rescue Disc, and booted into windows. Allowed the drivers to update, and restarted when prompted.

That was it all was well and my Windows boot time dropped by about 40%.

Of additional note here, is that the new raid drive was larger than the old OS partition. If I had gone from larger to smaller Acronis would have just shrunk the partition. However going the other way it left the partition smaller than the drive. I wanted the partition to be the max the drive could handle so i used Windows Disk Management to re size the OS partition. On most earlier versions of windows i would have had to use a 3rd party partition software, or used a Pre environment boot and use FDISK to expand the OS partition.

My home media setup.

A while back I realized kids + optical media = bad. I also realized kids really like to watch movies. So I made the decision to look into a media center and media center extenders. I looked over Myth TV and Windows XP Media Center originally. I ultimately decided to go with MCE. Therefore my initial deployment consisted of a Windows XP MCE2005 box, and 3 Modified XBOX's with XBMC installed. It used Samba shares, was relatively in expensive and all in all worked pretty well.

Times change things get updated and HD is king. These days I am using a Vista Ultimate machine as my MCE, and XBOX 360s as my extenders. This offers a couple advantages to my old setup.

-Streaming of Live TV
-True extender capabilities
-HD quality

Setup for a Vista MCE is pretty simple. I personally use a pair of Hauppauge HD Video Capture devices, there are a few to choose from almost all are compatible with Windows Media Center. I use a generic IR blaster for the remote as well. As for the XBOX 360s it is a relatively straight forward set-up to add these as extenders.

As for the DVD-Less media I eluded to in the intro, well that is slightly more complicated and quite frankly treads upon a legally gray line.

I use DVD rips on a file share to keep my kids from destroying originals. I personally use Xilsoft DVD Ripper to rip the DVDs into xvid or divx formats. After you have ripped the DVDs and stored them on a files share (you will need to give read rights to the everyone user) you can use the "Video" option on the 360s launcher screen. In the video option the 360 will have you point to your share. After you have pointed your 360 at the share, you can go ahead and try playing a video. The 360 is going to want you to connect to XBOX Live and download an update in order to play the content. After you have downloaded, and installed the content the 360 will restart. After the restart, grats you can save your DVDs from the terrors of toddlerhood.

There are a lot of other advantages to this setup. For example I have 4 TVs... 2 HD digital converters (Direct TV in my case). Then I simply use the extenders to watch TV in whichever room I am in. There is also the DVR capabilities of Media Center (Without the extra cost providers throw at you) And having access to other media (photos, music, etc.) anywhere in the house.

I have also come across several hacks and tricks for Windows MCE, I will go over those in a later post.

Related Links:

http://www.hauppauge.com/index.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/media-center.aspx
http://www.xilisoft.com/dvd-ripper.html
http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/xboxlive/troubleshooting/NetworkHelp_mcxpc.aspx