Recover Windows 10 to RAID 1 Array

[dcpugh]

Hi All - Here's my situation:

I have put together a new custom PC with some existing hardware (memory sticks, video card, case, and two 500GB drives). I replaced the motherboard, processor, DVD drive, and I added two 4TB hard drives. In this process, I reinstalled windows 10 but did so before configuring RAID on the motherboard. The install worked well and the PC seemed stable, just single-threaded on the boot drive.

Meanwhile, I made a Windows recovery image of the boot disk on an external USB drive which is accompanied by a bootable USB recovery stick.

Here's my desired end state: I would like the image of Windows 10 that I put on the recovery drive to be restored to a new RAID1 array made up of the two 500GB in the system (one of which was the source of the image in the first place)

Here's what I've tried: I enabled RAID in the BIOS, created two mirrored volumes, one 500GB boot volume and one 4TB storage volume. When I tried to recover the image to the new 500GB array, I've received errors such as that the volume size is too small. Not sure how this is possible considering it's the same 500GB drive used to make the image AND the mirror.

Here's where I finished: I broke the mirror, disabled RAID and restored the image successfully to the single 500GB drive from the recovery resources I created at the outset. Lame!

Question: does anyone know if what I'm trying to do is possible? Or is there some volume metadata that's non-RAID specific which will cause my image restore to fail every time? Very curious what you all think.

Thanks!

Dave

System Specs
ASUS 970 Pro Gaming / Aura Motherboard
AMD 8350FX 4GHz 8-core processor
2 X 4GB Ballistix RAM (1600 MHz)
1 X 1GB Crucial RAM (1333 MHz)
2 X 500GB Seagate SATA Drives
2 X 4TB Seagate SATA DRIVES
AMD 5770 Video Card
Generic ATX Case

 

[popatim]

Have you tried adding the raid driver during image restore process?

I'm not sure on 10 but on 8 you began as if you were going to install Windows and load the raid drivers when asked if you had additional drivers. After loading the drivers you cancel the install. This brings you back to the main menu with the raid drivers still loaded. Now you can restore your image.

 

[dcpugh]

Have you tried adding the raid driver during image restore process?

I'm not sure on 10 but on 8 you began as if you were going to install Windows and load the raid drivers when asked if you had additional drivers. After loading the drivers you cancel the install. This brings you back to the main menu with the raid drivers still loaded. Now you can restore your image.

Thanks! Do you know how to extract the drivers to a USB drive so I can install them during the recovery? I have the AMD chipset and I when I found the package on the AMD site it was an EXE file that looked like ti should be run after the fact.

Thoughts?

 

[popatim]

winzip or winrar should be able to open the exe and extract them
or just have a friend download them and run it, install to a flash drive of course.