RAID... from a backup image?

[EDO219]

Greetings, everyone.

My new rig has two identical HDDs and a mobo ready for a RAID (0 or 1, I think) configuration. I was under the impression that one could simply install Windows 7 on one HDD and later go into Disk Management and convert it to a RAID setup. It seems, however, the button to do so has been grayed out.

Let's say I partition the first HDD. Could I then allocate the remaining disk space of the first HDD and all of the disk space on the second HDD to a RAID setup? I think the RAID menu in my BIOS recognizes the actual HDDs and ignores any partitions, but I'm not certain.

 

[DelJo63]

that sequence will not work.

1) you create the RAID-X array to include drives {1,2,...n}
2) format the array
3) then load the data.

Now once an array is operational, some raid software will allow a new drive to replace one which is 'broken'
ie: will format and resync data to it (for the raid-1 variations) or for raid-0,
the recovery sequence will get it formatted (and the restore will sync the data)

 

[madboyv1]

In addition to what jobeard said

1: The BIOS does not care what partition your drives have, just that they are there and accessible.

2: You cannot convert a basic disk partition in windows to a dynamic disk (used for Window's software raid) if the Operating System resides in it.

Rather than using Window's RAID software, you should set up your RAID using the onboard chipset on the motherboard. It will likely perform at least as well if not better.

But yeah, I found out the hard way a while back that you can't use an active disk with data to make a, say RAID 1 and then simply sync the data; you need to start fresh.

 

[DelJo63]

2: You cannot convert a basic disk partition in windows to a dynamic disk (used for Window's software raid) if the Operating System resides in it.

The Windows Dynamic Disk feature is related to the LVM concept (logical volume manager) of Unix - - that is not the same as Raid-anything.
There are two services in windows;

Logical Disk Manager & Logical Disk Manager Admin Service and
together they allow two or more HDs to operate as one, but not as RAID-0.​

Dynamic Disks will take (eg: two 320gb HDs) two drives and make them act as it there were only one 640gb drive.
That said, it is clear there is no raid features, but just a larger capacity.