Raid 1 without format?

I recently bought another hard drive and I am trying to get it to mirror my current hard drive with my Chaintech VNF3-250's integrated SATA RAID controller. The drives have the same capacity and are both from the same series (Diamondmax 10) but my old drive was discontinued so the only difference is that the new drive has a 16mb cache instead of 8.

I have formatted and initialized the new drive, but what I am trying to do is set up this array without formatting my primary drive because it has my OS and all my other junk on it. I don't really have a way to back all this stuff up at the moment so I can't afford to format it when setting up this raid 1 array. So basically I'm out of ideas on how to get this to work, which I chalk up to inexperience. I go into my BIOS and enable RAID on the 2 sata channels and then save. Upon entering RAID configuration, I set it to mirror and move both drives into the array, decline the 'clear disk data' prompt. The next thing I did is press R for rebuild, and it allows me to select either drive, but the confusing thing is that I don't know if I'm supposed to select the drive to be mirrored or the drive that is blank. I select the blank drive and exit out of the configurator. Everything proceeds as normal and I get the faintest glimpse of hope as the Windows XP loading screen appears for about 1/4 a second and then my computer goes into an endless loop of getting to the xp loading screen and then rebooting again and again. Not good.

I have not been able to boot to windows with RAID enabled. Sorry that this question is so long winded, but I'm just trying to make sure I give all the information I need so that somebody can help me get this darn thing to work. I've been trying to get this thing going for 2 days. Any and all help will be appreciated. Thanks.

The reason for the rebooting is because of the change in hard disk controllers. You'll need to run a repair on the OS, and load the SATA RAID drivers during the setup phase (Press F6 for additional SCSI controllers, I can't remember the exact phrase). Have the drivers on a floppy.

Know Nuttin said:

The reason for the rebooting is because of the change in hard disk controllers. You'll need to run a repair on the OS, and load the SATA RAID drivers during the setup phase (Press F6 for additional SCSI controllers, I can't remember the exact phrase). Have the drivers on a floppy.

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Alright, I have a question about repair-installing XP. After everything loads up and it asks to press ENTER to install XP and R to repair an installation of XP, is that the time that I press R for repair? In some repair install guides it says to press enter at that prompt, and R at the next prompt, which didn't show up the last time I attempted it.

I can try this method out as soon as I know exactly how to go about this darn repair. Also, am I installing these drivers before or after the repair.

Thanks.

Oh my god. Thank you so much. I did a repair install and it actually worked. I let it sit in windows and I'm happy to report that I have a healthy, mirroring array right now. Now my problem is that my dialup networking connection is gone and I can't create a new one. Trying to create one results in an Error 711. Also, if I try to create it the normal way (create a new connection), dialup up connection is greyed out. Not good. I'm going to try to figure out something, but if anyone has any ideas, let me know. I won't really be able to check once I get home though.

Anywho, thanks so much for the help with that suggestion.

That problem sounds to me like a driver issue with the modem. Reinstall the modem driver.

Turns out to be a quick fix. I googled the error code and found some solutions to it. I think when I repair installed XP it screwed up SP2 so I re-installed SP2 and also set a few services (telephony and remote access control) to automatically be enabled in services. Scared me for a minute there but it works now.