Possible to change system drive from single drive to RAID mirror?

[dwcal]

I have an Nforce4 system. I installed Windows XP on a single 250GB drive. Now I have a second 250GB drive. Can I mirror them with the Nforce RAID without reinstalling Windows? I know it would be a bit of a hack if I tried this. I can always image the C: drive to recover if I get an unbootable Windows.

BTW This was really easy with the software RAID in Windows 2000 and 2003 Server. Select the 2nd drive in Disk Management and create mirror. But the software RAID in Windows needs to convert the partitions to dynamic disk, and I'm dual booting with Linux.

 

[Nothinman]

XP doesn't support redundant software RAID and even if it did, it requires a dynamic disk as you've noticed.

Using the controller's software RAID might work, but I wouldn't bet any money on it. Chances are you'll have to at least repair XP and Linux might be more work since it will most likely see both drives seperately no matter what the BIOS says until you load the right driver. If you don't have anything to lose in the Linux install I would say blow it away and reinstall it inside of VMWare or VPC, it'll be a lot more convenient.

 

[bsobel]

Many of those controllers reservere a small portion of the drive to hold the mirror/raid information. So if you setup the raid, it may work, but windows will error when accessing that part of the drive (usually the last few clusters on the disk, at least with promise controllers).

I've done it, but it's a pain cause the errors keep things like diskmanager from working correctly. Have one box I need to nuke and resetup because of it....

Bill

 

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Many of those controllers reservere a small portion of the drive to hold the mirror/raid information. So if you setup the raid, it may work, but windows will error when accessing that part of the drive (usually the last few clusters on the disk, at least with promise controllers).

Yeah, I heard about that, so I saved a little unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. I already installed the Nvidia IDE drivers with a single drive in the system so I'll just mess with it a bit and see.

 

[TGS]

Just use the onboard and recreate with a mirrored pair. That way both windows and linux will have mirror volumes to use.

 

[dwcal]

Just a quick update. I enabled the NVRAID in the BIOS and Windows detected a new device, NVIDIA nForce RAID Class controller. Unfortunately, I can't install the driver. It says "An error occurred during the installation of the device. The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it." This was after browsing in Device Manager to the folder that was unzipped from the nForce driver installer. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the nForce drivers (version 6.66), but same problem.

I already imaged the OSes just to be safe, and I'll be doing a clean install pretty soon if I can't figure out a better way.

 

[Bozo]

Put your system back to original.
Install the drivers for your motherboard RAID controller.
Make an image of the hard drive.
Shut down and restart your computer. In your BIOS or RAID setup software, configure your drives as RAID 1.
Install the image that you made.

It's been a while since I've done this, but I think you can see what to do.

Bozo