Windows 7: Upgrade Installation to Win7 Software RAID0 Array

I was trying to install an upgrade version of Windows 7 on a RAID0 array.  This post contains some notes on what I learned about the possibilities.

I had a new basic hard drive.  I started by installing Win7 on that drive.  The upgrade version of Windows 7 required a previous version of Windows to be installed.  It was not enough just to have the previous disc or serial number.  I was interested in upgrading from Windows XP.  To accomplish this installation, then, I had to install my copy of Windows XP and then upgrade from there.

Having done that, I used Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) in Win7 to create a couple of Windows 7 software RAID0 arrays on two other empty hard drives.  Unlike other RAID solutions, Win7 was willing to create multiple arrays and single-drive partitions on a pair of drives being used in a RAID0 array.

I hoped to install Win7 into one of those arrays (which I called PROG-FUTURE), and to put my data into another.  Of course, since this was RAID0, I planned to have a good backup scheme for the data.

I went ahead and copied my data into that RAID0 data array.  Later, when it came time to try to install the Win7 upgrade to the PROG-FUTURE array, it seemed that this might have been a mistake.  An attempt to install WinXP to PROG-FUTURE got as far as the point where the installer recognized the various partitions on my drives.  It saw the entire hard drive as a single dynamic disk.  In other words, WinXP might have been willing to install to at least one of the two drives I was using for my RAID arrays.  It gave no sign that it would install itself in any array format to two drives simultaneously.

I was not sure whether an attempt to install WinXP, Win7, or any other operating system to a dynamic drive would run into problems.  There did exist a Dynamic Disk Converter program, and probably others like it, that would apparently be able to convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk format.  I could not say how well such programs would work.

It had occurred to me that perhaps I could use the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH) to restore a working Win7 installation to the PROG-FUTURE array.  My attempts along those lines did not succeed.  As far as I could tell, ATIH was not capable of restoring a RAID0 array.

Another possibility was to use Ubuntu 10.10 to copy Windows 7 program files from a Win7 installation on a basic drive to the PROG-FUTURE array.  This did not appear feasible at this time, however, because Ubuntu evidently could not see the Win7 RAID0 array as such.  I also wasn't sure whether the resulting partition would actually boot.

An attempt to install directly from the Win7 upgrade CD to the PROG-FUTURE array failed early in the process, when I received this error message:

Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space.  The partition contains one or more dynamic volumes that are not supported for installation.

It appeared, in other words, that Windows 7 could not be installed to a software RAID0 array created by Win7 itself.  I found a thread suggesting that there were ways to make it work, but it seemed that the process was tricky and prone to problems.  It appeared that the array would probably better be created from some other software or by using a RAID0 controller on the motherboard or on a separate controller card.  Another possibility that I had not heard of previously was native virtual hard disk (VHD) boot.

Acronis Universal Restore: Getting the Drivers

As shown in another post in this blog, I was in the process of using the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH) to restore an Acronis drive image from one drive to another.  For this purpose, Acronis made clear that I would need certain motherboard drivers to succeed:

You [must] have drivers for the hard disk drive controller or chipset drivers for the new computer. These drivers are critical for booting the operating system. You can download the drivers for your motherboard on the Vendor's web-site. Please note, if you downloaded the drivers in *.exe, *.cab, *.zip format, you should extract them first. The driver files should have the *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions.

My motherboard was a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H.  I went to Gigabyte's download webpage and indicated that I wanted drivers for 32-bit Windows 7.  They offered me several kinds of drivers:  audio, chipset/VGA, LAN, and SATA RAID.  Plainly, Acronis was not telling me to get the audio or LAN drivers.  I definitely needed the chipset/VGA driver.  How about the SATA RAID driver?  I wasn't using hardware RAID.  I was relying on Windows 7 software RAID, and it did not require the floppy-based pre-Windows installation procedure that those SATA RAID drivers required.  The description of the chipset driver said "AMD Chipset Driver (include chipset\sata raid\vga driver)."  That sounded like the all-purpose thing Acronis wanted.  So I guessed that I probably needed only the chipset/VGA driver.

The chipset driver was a 62MB download called motherboard_driver_chipset_amd_7series-v2.0_win7-32.exe.  My first question was, how do I extract drivers from an .exe file?  I tried running it.  Fortunately, it unzipped itself.  Apparently it was packaged as an executable whose purpose in executing was just to let itself breathe.  Next, how to find the .inf, .sys, or .oem file(s) needed?  I focused Windows Explorer on the unzipped folder and typed *.inf in the search bar at the top right-hand corner of the Windows Explorer screen.  I hit Ctrl-A to select everything that the search produced, Ctrl-C to copy them all, and then went off and created a new folder (not on drive C) and hit Ctrl-V to paste these copies into there.  I did the same thing for .sys and .oem.  There weren't any .oem files, but I came up with 16 of the other two kinds.

Those may or may not have been the right drivers.  I hoped that ATIH would look at the folder, when doing its Universal Restore, and would see what it wanted in there.  Unfortunately, as described in another post in this blog under the title, "Acronis True Image Home 2011:  Restoring Windows 7 to RAID 0," this was pretty much where the matter died.  The responses to a question I had posed in Acronis's support forum were indicating that I could not restore to a Win7 software RAID0 array.