EggXpert

HOW TO CONVERT WINDOWS TO A RAID (1)

STEP 1: Put windows on a HDD that WILL NOT BE ON THE RAID CONTROLLER. whether you have 2 SATA controllers OR put windows on IDE or USB drive then RAID your SATA's

STEP 2:  Boot into windows. and allow it to see the raid, install the drivers and any raid utility you have.

STEP3: disconnect 1 of the raid drives and boot off your prefered "Ultimate CD"

STEP 4: Clone/Ghost windows onto the lonely RAIDed drive using the partition to partition method (otherwise you will ERASE the raided partition with a non raided partition.) Ghost says it cannot work with raids that's why if you disconnect 1 drive and copy over to one it should not matter if it is a RAID drive or not.

STEP 5: Boot off your Windows XP or VISTA CD and run recovery console, Run fixmbr then fixboot (This is probably redundant running both. as most likely only 1 does what you need done, but i did not bother to test it.)

STEP 5: Reconnect your other raid drive/drives and boot into windows.

Windows should boot fine since it has seen THIS exact raid before and the raid utility should begin 'fixing' the other raid drives that were disconnected during the initial cloning process.

This is what worked for me... It is very possible this is common knowledge but after my entire department searching the internet and calling in favors we could find NO success story of CONVERTING a windows 'current' install into a RAID.

this ENTIRE process took only 1 1/2 hours! including all the cloning time and was for a RAID 1 Setup... i have doubt about it being possible for a RAID 0 setup... MAYBE a RAID 1+0 with 1HDD RAID 1 to 2 RAID 0 HDD's

 

(This is  kind of a double post. It is also in the A+ forums, but it was in thier originally while we were looking for a solution and now that we have one I am posting the cleaned up answer here.)

Oh also Why Convert Windos to a Raid instead of just doing a clean install?  i agree that is the best option and will ALWAYS recommend it. The computer we converted had thousands of dollars of software installed lots of $100,000+ programs with INSANE activation processes. It woudl have taken, no exageration, WEEKS to setup the system some of this software require servers for activation, some need to be de-activated, some you have to call the company and ask them to e-mail you a special activation file, and other require a USB or PS2 Dongel for activation... So this was the quickest method.

you could have loaded the raid drivers on the windows OS.....once there it should be able to deal with the aray. [image the drive first to ensure you can restore it if need be.]

Tallon41

We tried it... that and many other things. this was the method that finall worked...

We assumed before we started the conversion all we would have to do was load the drivers then go to the array.... nope

then we figured we would try Windows repair to add in the RAID... nope

We tried ALOT of methods and I used these very forums to get the ideas and nothing worked till we tried this.