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Covert single disk to RAID and vice versus

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NameSniper

Registered
Joined
Mar 20, 2005
Hello,

Lets imagine three situations:
1)You have two hard drives in your PC. Drive A contains Windows installation and other files. Drive B is an empty drive. Your Motherboard supports RAID 1(additionally 0 and 5) and you want to setup hardware RAID 1.
Is it possible to switch HDD to RAID mode, enter RAID BIOS, create array using drive A, copy drive B content to drive A and run RAID 1 using two drives(drive A should rebuild array on next restart and copy mirror drive A on drive B)

2)You have two drives, drive A and drive B running in hardware RAID 1.
You need to format drive B, copy drive A's content oto drive B(which should be non-raid drive now) and install non-raid drive B on another PC.

3)You have three drive A, B, C.
Drive C contains Windows and other files. You need to setup RAID 1 using drive A and B and then copy Windows from drive C to newly created array consisting of drive A and B.

All three scenarios require no Windows re-installation.

Can anyone please post step by step tutorial for all three scenarios or point to already posted appropriate tutorials?
 
Hello,

Lets imagine three situations:
1)You have two hard drives in your PC. Drive A contains Windows installation and other files. Drive B is an empty drive. Your Motherboard supports RAID 1(additionally 0 and 5) and you want to setup hardware RAID 1.
Is it possible to switch HDD to RAID mode, enter RAID BIOS, create array using drive A, copy drive B content to drive A and run RAID 1 using two drives(drive A should rebuild array on next restart and copy mirror drive A on drive B)

2)You have two drives, drive A and drive B running in hardware RAID 1.
You need to format drive B, copy drive A's content oto drive B(which should be non-raid drive now) and install non-raid drive B on another PC.

3)You have three drive A, B, C.
Drive C contains Windows and other files. You need to setup RAID 1 using drive A and B and then copy Windows from drive C to newly created array consisting of drive A and B.

All three scenarios require no Windows re-installation.

Can anyone please post step by step tutorial for all three scenarios or point to already posted appropriate tutorials?


as soon as you create a raid array the disks basically lose all data as the chipset switches how data is stored. I don't think it is possible to do what you want.... atleast how I understand your post. it is rather confusing.
 
1) First, on board RAID is not "hardware" RAID as it still uses the processor for parity calculations. What you are asking is possible in Linux (mdadm) because you can add a drive into a "failed" RAID 1 array and then add the second drive as a hot spare. This will cause it to "rebuild" into a working RAID 1 array. I doubt Windows will let you do this. On board RAID for sure will not let you do this.

2) I don't understand why you would do this. In RAID 1, both drives contain the exact same information, so why do you have to break the array and copy the data over? It would already have it. This question makes no sense.

3) See my answer to 1
 
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