RAID 1

[Douglashen]

My Dell came with Raid1 implemented on it. I have never paid much attention
to it as I use an offsite backup. Recently I looked at Drive 2 to see what
was on it and discovered that it was empty. Disk properties show almost no
usage at all where drive 1 is almost half full. This uses an Intel Raid
drive and a system check says the controller is working normally. What's
going on?

 

[sgopus]

most likely the raid controller was made active, but the raid drives
themselves were never set up, so all data was written to drive 1, just a guess

 

[Douglashen]

Sounds logical to me. Now, how do I set up the drives?

 

[sgopus]

See if this helps

Embedded media from this media site is no longer available

 

[Randem]

Go into BIOS, there is a RAID selection. Just turn it on...

--
Randem Systems
Your Installation Specialist
The Top Inno Setup Script Generator
http://www.randem.com/innoscript.html
Disk Read Error Press Ctl+Alt+Del to Restart
http://www.randem.com/discus/messages/9402/9406.html?1236319938

 

[Paul]

Sounds logical to me. Now, how do I set up the drives?

If you

1) Enabled RAID in the BIOS, before the OS was installed...

2) Installed a RAID driver via pressing F6 during the WinXP install...

3) Had only a single disk connected, as far as the software is concerned...

Then, you can use "RAID Migration" via the Intel RAID Management
software. Installing RAID consists of two components

a) The drivers.
b) The RAID Management application.

Chapter 6 here, discusses installing the Matrix Storage Manager
(the RAID Management application).

http://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/8_x_raid_ahci_users_manual.pdf

And chapter 8 discusses "RAID Migration", and in particular,
going from a single drive, to a two drive RAID 1 mirror.
The MSM software can actually migrate to RAID 1, while the
OS is operating, so can run in the background. Or you
could leave it chugging away, overnight.

This picture, shows a portion of the Intel MSM dialog.

http://www.thg.ru/storage/raid_migration_level/images/intel-modify-volume.gif

HTH,
Paul