Setting up RAID 1

T

TheResidentEvil

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 12, 2009
Messages
1,943
I am getting a 2nd hard drive today for my wife. I want to set up RAID 1 so that she can have two drives mirrored. This is so she does not lose pictures in the event of a hard drive crash.

I have never had to set up RAID before. I have a asus p5k64 ws motherboard. How do I set them in RAID and do i lose all the data currently on the drive if I do this? Any help is appreciated.
 
For what O/S are you setting up RAID? WinXP? Vista? Win 7? There should be an option when you setup a RAID 1 array that says Create and duplicate. This will preserve the data on the source disk. Here is a step by step for Windows XP
 
I'm seeing something here about creating the RAID1 with 1 drive, which will make it limp and wait for the 2nd drive, and then you can mirror your existing drive onto the new RAID1 drive and then install it into the RAID1 and let it rebuild, let me read further coz I'm not sure if that's what they're saying.
 
NoForgiveness said:
I'm seeing something here about creating the RAID1 with 1 drive, which will make it limp and wait for the 2nd drive, and then you can mirror your existing drive onto the new RAID1 drive and then install it into the RAID1 and let it rebuild, let me read further coz I'm not sure if that's what they're saying.
Click to expand...

I don't have experience with your particular onboard RAID (though I have done similar things with Intel ICH RAID before, it doesn't chomp data as long as you configure the array properly), but that's typically how it's done. You create a RAID-1 array in degraded state with only one disk, the one with your data on it, then once that is running you add the new drive and let the array rebuild as if it had failed. That's how you can be sure that the correct drive is selected by the controller, and it doesn't decide the blank drive is the master and copy the blank drive over the one full of data.

Though as ever, when doing this kind of thing, do a full backup first.
 
keenan said:
I don't have experience with your particular onboard RAID (though I have done similar things with Intel ICH RAID before, it doesn't chomp data as long as you configure the array properly), but that's typically how it's done. You create a RAID-1 array in degraded state with only one disk, the one with your data on it, then once that is running you add the new drive and let the array rebuild as if it had failed. That's how you can be sure that the correct drive is selected by the controller, and it doesn't decide the blank drive is the master and copy the blank drive over the one full of data.

Though as ever, when doing this kind of thing, do a full backup first.
Click to expand...

That settles it then :)
 
Well i cant figure this out. i set sata config in bios to RAID and then i load the raid util with ctrl m and it just keeps telling me no hard drive detected. any help
 
I figured it out. The problem was I have 2 different RAID controllers on the mobo. One for ICH9R and one Marvell one. When i disabled the marvel one, i was finally able to ctrl+i to get into the intel matrix settings.

Now i set up raid 1, had everything working for a day and a half. last night one of the hard drives went into degraded state and says I need to replace it. bought it on black friday, are these pretty reliable warnings? do i need to just RMA it
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top