New hardrive

[Volk]

Alright, since I am not super tech savvy like half the Wolvies here are, I need a little help. I am currently running a Raid 5 with 3 150GB drives, but at least one of them is degraded. I just bought a single 1TB drive to replace the raid and make things easier for me (I may get a few more TB drives and raid them again eventually, but not a priority).


My question is if it is possible to copy everything (I mean like *.* everything) over to the new drive, get rid of the raid, and not have to reinstall all of my drivers and programs, windows, and everything else that is just a huge time sink. I really don't want to have to go to the Geek Squad and pay $200 for this, and I have a tech buddy coming over next weekend to help, but he's not sure it possible, either.

[ZONK]

I really doubt it would be possible. Disclaimer: I am not expert in RAID and don't use it everyday so anyone else that does use it on a home setup feel free to correct me.

As I understand it isn't possible to go from RAID to NON-RAID. There might be some crazy expensive program that will take the time to byte by byte convert a logical container into a single image to copy to a hard drive, but didn't find it on google.

The only thing I heard of is going from RAID to RAID to increase size:
I have heard of options to image each hard drive in your array, storage those images somewhere, then put the images on 3 new larger hard drives and adjust the size of the array once it back up.

Sorry if none of that helps.

[Jim Tressel]

With the constraints you've given, I don't believe it is possible.

You can install the 1tb drive without adding it to the raid array and copy data to it, but if your goal is to get away from raid, you're going to have to re-install the OS and programs on the standalone disk.  I think.

Gron, you're Captain Raid.  What say you?