Q: My goal is to do RAID 1 on 2 seperate hard drives but using Windows XP. Right now I am sharing my hard drive on my network but I want to make it so that all the data I put on the seperate hard drive will be mirrored on the other disk. Basic Layout Desired: Disk 1: Windows XP Disk 2: Windows File Sharing Disk 3: Backup of Disk 2 Disk 2+3: RAID 1 I do not mind if I need to get SATA Drives or something. Just let me know how I can get the RAID 1 working.
A: From what I gather, you need to install your OS, with the configuration set, but you need blank drives to start. "In order to designate our hard drives as a RAID before installing Windows, we entered the VIA SATA RAID utility. To do this, we pressed TAB during bootup. We selected Create Array and then Array Mode RAID 1 (Mirroring) and RAID 1 For Data Protection. Next we chose Select Disk Drives (pressing ENTER to highlight both Maxtor 160GB drives) and then Start Create Process. The utility asked us if we wanted to copy one drive's contents to the other. We typed N for no, as there wasn't anything on either drive yet. After VIA warned us that any data on our drives would be "destoried," whatever that is, we went ahead with the array creation. Back in the main menu, we chose Select Boot Array to designate our new RAID 1 as the boot device. "