RAID 1 Windows 2000 server

[dyson38]

I have a windows 2000 server with c:\ drive being made up of 2 partitions (C:\ and E:\)

if I add a second hard drive of equal size, make the primary drive and new drive dynamic then mirror (raid 1) them will it keep a mirror of both partitions c: & e: on the new drive?

 

Thank you.

[danrhodes]

Hi Dyson,

 

It depends what you want to do. I presume that you mean your System Drive is made up of 2 Drives of equal size in RAID?

 

Or do you want to add a second physical drive to enable raid on your System Drive?

 

Dan

[bossman]

@dyson38:

I think off top of me head that you would have to backup the whole of the drive first, format, install new O/S add the other drive and configure RAID 1 to mirror both drives with the partitions you require then restore from backup the original setup.

 

I could be wrong there could be some software out there that would do this for you but this is the way I would go.

[dyson38]

Its made up of 1 system drive containing 2 partitions c: containing the O/S and d: containing data files. Im going to add a second drive of same size and use dynamic disks to mirror them, Ive done this before and all works great (no format or reload of o/s required (only req for hardware raid)) the only difference this time is that there are 2 partitions so when i mirror will both partitions be on the mirror?

[Michael]

It's a good question and thinking about it logically, this is how I would do it.

 

By installing a secondary drive, you need to create the same partition sizes on this drive. So if if C:\ is 20GB and E:\ is 60GB, create the same configuration on the secondary drive.

 

Convert both disks to dynamic, then initialise the software RAID.

 

I haven't done this in practice, but I am guessing this would be the procedure. Either way, make sure you do a full backup before doing anything!!

[dyson38]

Thank you for your help, think I will try that out on a test server before trying

it for real on the DC...cant afford any silly mistakes and dont need the stress of restoring from backup...just in case!