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Hi everyone, vista question, specifically pertaining to the business edition, which is what I have on my machine.

I'm finally getting some replacement drives for my degraded RAID-5 array. My plan is actually to upgrade from a 3 drive RAID-5 to a 4 drive RAID-10. How I migrate the array is up in the air, but can become a lot simpler depending on the answer to the following question.

Back when I was using Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 server, the server version had a feature where it could mirror a drive in software, essentially the ability to create a RAID-1 software array for redundancy, and then be able to boot from the mirrored drive if the original was missing, etcetera. The only requirement was that the drive to be mirrored was a dynamic disk rather than a basic disk. It was also possible to enable this feature in the desktop version of windows 2000 by modifying a few bytes of a system file.

What I'm wodnering is if this feature is available in Vista Business, as it would make migrating my RAID much easier. With this feature I could set up a stand alone hard disk as a mirror of either the degraded or repaired RAID-5 array, break the mirror, boot from the standalone disk, delete the RAID-5 array, create the array as RAID-10, and then mirror the standalone drive back to the RAID-10 array. After thats all done, I simply break the mirror again and Ive got my RAID-10 array and a stand alone drive to store my porn..er..media on.

So, is it possible to use this feature in vista business, or am I going to have to find some kind of drive mirroring software to do this for me? I'd really prefer to not have to bother with new software when there's the possibility of using something I've already used in the past, especially when that something did exactly what I wanted it to.

http://www.lockergnome.com/it/2006/11/2 ... -in-vista/

google is powerful

Did you even read what I wrote?

I'm not asking how to convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, I'm asking if I convert the disc to dynamic, will I have the option to create a mirrored volume.

And I've googled it extensively.

All I want is a yes or no answer from someone a little knowledgeable.

Why don't you try it and find out?

no. go make a back up.

you are making backups right?

Xamindar wrote:Why don't you try it and find out?

Well because I dont even have a replacement disk for my RAID array yet, or a standalone disk to mirror to, so the option would be greyed out anyway until I get a disk big enough to hold a mirror of the volume.

I am pretty sure Vista business doesn't have that functionality - at least I have never come across it.

I'm not 100% sure on the difference between your various RAID setups, but I'll explain how I would try and do it. If you can get a Norton Ghost Boot disc (I can send an ISO if you want it), then you can boot up onto it. I am assuming your RAID is all hardware based - otherwise any software RAID's you have that are striped probably won't work in Norton.

Once booted up into Norton, you can create an image of your HD and put it on another HD. It only requires the amount of data on your disc (meaning if you create an image of a 1TB drive, but only have 100GB of data, your image will only be 100GB). Plus norton ghost has some decent compression.

Not sure if that helps or not.