the problem is a backup would require more harddrive space than i have on any other 1 harddrive. i can do it, but it's gonna be spanned across several hard drives.
Its a RAID 1.
Just drag all your important data to whatever combination of HDDs you have, just in case, and break the mirror. All your data should be intact on both HDDs and should be accessible even on the other drive and even if you don't boot from it.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-022836.htm
Build your new machine and drop in one of the HDDs. See if it boots. If it does, your golden! Fix all your driver issues and delete the volume on your second drive. Now go into Windows Drive Manager and select to mirror your boot drive with your deleted volume. Now you have a mirrored drive and you can migrate it to any Windows system and never worry about this again.
If it does not boot then just reinstall Windows on one drive and see if it boots. If it does then check your drivers, programs and stability. Once everything is in order delete the volume on the 2nd drive and set up a mirror for your boot drive with the Windows Drive Manger.
Finally if that does not work, and this is what I would do if I were going to do a mirror anyway, just do a clean install on one drive and then drag all your data over from the other drive. Delete the volume on the second drive and form a mirror in Windows.
The other drives you have with your backed up data are just there in case the worst happens and you somehow lose both drives from your current RAID 1.
************************************************Unsolicited Advice*******************************************************
The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to scrap the RAID 1 and just set the second drive as a "back-up" drive. Schedule up your computer to do regular back-ups from your boot drive to it. Daily, weekly or whatever suits you best depending on how you use your computer. You can even, if you have W7 Professional, do incremental image backups of the entire drive so that you will always have an image of the boot drive on your second HDD without incurring the same level of wear as your boot drive does. If your boot drive fails you can just buy a new drive and have the image of your old boot drive written to it. In under an hour, not including driving/shipping, you will be right back where you were before the drive failure without the loss in performance or the wear and tear on your second drive from a software RAID 1. If you don't have a copy of W7 Professional you can get one for $30 if you have or know someone friendly with a .edu email address.
If you want to always have your computer available to you that is still possible with the backup image drive/boot drive setup I outlined. After you do a clean install of Windows install only the updates and your critical programs. Make sure the "Back-up" settings are such that this drive will never have a scheduled "Back-up Image" created before the next step and then reverse this afterwards. Create an image of your boot drive as it is and then have that image written to one of your extra smaller HDDs. Have another of your extra HDDs in your system set as a backup for a library folder called "Critical". Attach any folders that contain critical data that you need daily to this library and have it back-up daily. If your your boot drive ever fails you can just install your backup OS drive and have access to your critical data until you acquire a replacement HDD for on back-up boot drive image. The reason to disable"Back-up" in the OS before creating an image of it is to insure that you never accidentally over write your true boot drive image with your back up boot drive. I would also just have the drive mounted but unconnected inside the case near your true boot drive and marked as a backup with a sharpie for good measure.
Finally if you are using W7 and you migrate to an AMD board, I suggest not installing any drivers whatsoever. Just run the board with the Microsoft drivers for a bit and see how it performs. I think you will see, as I have, that it actually performs better than if you use the AMD drivers. I use an ASUS MB so my experience may not apply to drivers from other manufactures. That said, its no big deal to run your board a little while before installing the drivers and comparing performance.
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