RAID partition moving, difficulties

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This is something that's been making me seriously wonder so I figured I'd best ask for some help.

I have a Win2k3 server with a Highpoint 2310 hardware RAID5 array of 4 disks and 3 additional hard drives of varying sizes. Now, I can successfully partition and clone information among the standard hard drives but as soon as I try to do anything more than create, delete or rename a partition on the RAID 5 arrays the whole thing freezes completely. This happens with everything from Partition Magic Pro to Disk Director (server versions).

About the only thing that I've finally had any luck with is using the newest 750Gb HD as a temporary store and creating empty NTFS drive spaces of the same size as the ones I wish to move and then use Ghost 11 to clone the drives out to the temp drive before re-cloning them back to the new drive size I want them in.

I'd tried googling until I'm blue in the face but just cannot find anything to indicate where or what I'm doing wrong so any clues would be appreciated.

Possible factors include:
- ASUS A8N-E board
- Opteron 180 CPU
- 4Gb RAM with BIOS set to push extra past 3.4Gb into useable mem space (or something like that)

All the drives are SATA II with Seagate 320Gb for RAID 5, Samsung F1-750Gb, Hitachi 250Gb and Seagate 160Gb 7200.9 as system drive.

Interestingly the icybox seems to be indicating a "host error" on the 750Gb drive but all tests indicate there's nothing wrong and as I said the key issue seems to be the RAID5 array itself which seems to just hang.


It could be I'm being impatient but any suggestions would be welcome.

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It is probably to do with the drivers of the RAID controller, when the imaging software hits it it may attempt to access it in a different way or use its own drivers that are not quite compatible.

I have had good luck with DriveSnapshot which can do a live backup from inside windows. The restore did not work directly in my case but you can mount the image as a drive and clone from that which seemed to get around iffy controllers when I was having similar issues.

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It is probably to do with the drivers of the RAID controller, when the imaging software hits it it may attempt to access it in a different way or use its own drivers that are not quite compatible.

That may well make sense of it.

I have had good luck with DriveSnapshot which can do a live backup from inside windows. The restore did not work directly in my case but you can mount the image as a drive and clone from that which seemed to get around iffy controllers when I was having similar issues.

Thanks for that tip..

I just backed up a 15GB test partition in less than 3 minutes which had my mouth hitting the floor Very useful.

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Just as a follow up...

I sat and watched ghost crawl for 3 hours to transfer a 100GB partition then tested to see how quickly Snapshot could do it... 10 minutes to backup, 10 minutes to restore.

*Cue: jaw hitting floor*

so, thanks again, that helped a LOT.