Short story: all is working
Medium story: spent days trying to get the RAID drivers working on Windows-based ànd Linux based boot media (cd / dvd), but failed. Only Windows setup was able to correctly load the RAID drivers
Long story: how to transfer / clone / copy existing single disc Windows Server installation to a new fresh RAID volume, without installing from scratch?
Well, as mentioned, all my bootdisks failed. I found many new exciting tools, but none of them support my Adaptec hostraid 5081 / DotHill SP5100 Raid controller
Red Hat Linux Enterprise 7 came close, but failed to get the correct size of the disk. In the end it still showed the total size available for 1 disc, not 4 configured in RAID 1+0. Window based bootdisks (manually created with driver slipstreamed OR added with the correct option given by the boot media builder software) ignored my RAID volume. Some even BSOD when I tried to right-click install one of the 2 given .inf files (from Supermicro website and FTP). The other .inf wouldn't work either; no error, no Logical Raid Volume
After spending over a week on this (I really hate to re-install my server after I spend good money on recovering the disc! And in worst-case scenarios I feel naked if I would be unable to read my raid volume when the OS doesn't boot any longer...) So I decided it was time for a new approach, though I was half-way installing Server 2012 R2 from scratch on the raid volume.
I went to google and searched on site:kickass.to for a Windows 7 x64 Lite installation dvd. I found 1 with Portugese settings (easy to change) but English language. At setup, I load raid drivers and I removed all existing partition on the raid volume. Then, I created a small partition (8GB should be enough without swap file!) and formatted that partition (ntfs) to install WIndows 7 Lite on.
Then, I had two options: Win dd to copy the single disc Windows installation OR use software to copy that partition. For DD I would have to shrink the original partition of 1 TB to fit within my 140GB Raid volume. So I decided to try some software, once more. Warez was allowed, but freeware had my preference. This time, RAID drivers wouldn't be a problem: I was already booted into Windows 7 so raid drivers were easily installed (yes I know: despite installing to RAID, the RAID drivers weren't installed yet ;p). Problem with Server OS is that almost all programs you know refuse to work on it. Might be technical reasons; mostly it is because of license restraints... :s
I found on Google Aomei's (search: server partition resize Partition Assistant Lite Edition (FREE for servers!)
http://www.disk-partition.com/partition-assistant-lite.htmlLuckily for me (and you?) is that it comes with free partition resize and free partition COPY! You can even chose between RAW (1TB partition needs to be resized first to fit in RAID) OR you can chose between "automatic"! The wizard is a little strange, but if you read what they say it all makes sense
Only thing to be sure of is that you are not using more data on the original disc than fits in the new raid partition.
TIP: don't forget to remove the pagefile first: the new Windows 7 might use it without asking. Disable it (advanced system settings) and reboot. Then you can use file unlocker 1.9.2 to remove the file. In my case it was 128GB hard disk space reclaimed ;-) A nice tool to check folder size is Treesize. An old tool, to be found in my CHeCKDiSK collection (
http://scforum.info/index.php?topic=8202.0)
As we speak, the copy process is running. I expect some problems still. I still did not run a checkdisk on my original server harddrive (I was advised not to by data recovery expert). So some badblocks still might be hidden. Or ntfs file corruption might still exist. But the old disc still boots and runs like it always did, despite the drive crash...
I'll keep you posted
Thank you all,
Devvie
POST-EDIT: seems I had PC-BSD RAID troubles too, once... ;p
https://pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=20649 . I didn't solve that one either ; )