Add existing OS drive to RAID1?

[Jimmy the Greek]

I have a drive that's been running an OS for the last year, but would like to add a mirror drive and put them in RAID1. Without reformatting the existing drive, can this be done, and what are the drawbacks?

 

[Drudenhaus]

Using what? You can probably do this with Linux software RAID. I doubt it will work in Windows as it won't have the right driver and will most likely just blue screen or reboot when attempting to load.

 

[vectravl400]

My only experience with this was doing on a data volume, not a system volume, but it did work (server 2k3). Not sure how a system drive would be handled, but I can't see why it wouldn't work, since the drives are still being addressed separately and windows is just writing the same thing to both of them. At least, that's my understanding of how software raid works.

 

[MentallyNormal]

I recently did this with a new dell inspirion 530 computer.
I added a secondary harddrive,enable raid in bios.
Boot the computer, it detect the raid controller which is intel.
Installed the Intel Matrix software.
Then the software gave a degraded warning and rebuilt the raid to the secondary drive.

It seems to be working with no problems.

 

[shade_star]

I recently did this with a new dell inspirion 530 computer.
I added a secondary harddrive,enable raid in bios.
Boot the computer, it detect the raid controller which is intel.
Installed the Intel Matrix software.
Then the software gave a degraded warning and rebuilt the raid to the secondary drive.

It seems to be working with no problems.

Some controllers wont 'convert' a standalone drive into an array.

If this is not the case and your controller wont support this then -

Insert raid card while server is off.
Dont hook anything up to it and then power server on and install raid drivers for the new hardware windows finds.
After thats done image the machine using something Acronis True Image Server
Now move the drive to the array and add your second drive and create the mirror.
Boot from the cd that comes with Acronis and image your machine back to the new array and boot.