Does windows 7 disk manager mirror disk or partitions?

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My servers Raid 1 disappeared when I did a bios update, And now in order to get it back I have to format my 2 * 3tb hard drives. Which isnt really a solution for me.

So I have desiced to try and make a software raid in windows 7 professional.

I am stuck on something now though.

If I right click on Disk0 then New Mirrored volume is greyed out. But I can right click on a partition and i get the option to Add Mirror.. Which do I want to do?

I am heading towards wanting a Mirrored Disk not just a partition. How can I un grey the option?

Even better would be how can I recover my motherboard raid? After the bios update, but disks appeared int eh cntrol+i menu seperately and there was no Raid Volume anymore? I can create a new raid volume but it then says it will delete all the data on this disk?

bla bla bla

Zapnologica

Posted 2014-04-28T17:42:20.653

Reputation: 201

Answers

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A Dynamic Disk’s special features work on the partition level. This is by design and nothing can be done about it. Still, it may be a better (as in “more predictable”) solution than your motherboards FakeRAID.

If you really need your system to be available (that’s what RAID does, it’s not backup), go for a real hardware RAID controller. Just check the maximum disk size, some older/cheaper ones are still limited to 2 TB.

Update

Your disk is full, so you can’t create new partitions, that is what “New mirrored volume” does. You can, however, add mirrors to existing partitions, like you noticed. This is what you want. Like I said, you can’t mirror a disk.If you want all partitions to be mirrored, you need to manually add mirrors to all partitions.

Daniel B

Posted 2014-04-28T17:42:20.653

Reputation: 40 502

Unfortunately price does come into play, and that would indeed require a reformat. – Zapnologica – 2014-04-28T20:37:08.593

This doesn't really answer the question for the user, as he still needs to wipe his data – Canadian Luke – 2014-04-28T20:41:29.857

If he wants to have another go at FakeRAID, yes. That cannot be avoided. I absolutely cannot recommend it anyway. Intel’s onboard RAID destroyed 500 GB (RAID 5) of precious data because of a lame software error. Don’t use it, ever. Seriously. He’s off way better with Dynamic Disks. – Daniel B – 2014-04-28T21:19:14.073

@DanielB OK but I cant do dynamic disk at the moment as create mirror array is grey out. How can I do this? because I dont just want to mirror a partition I want to mirror the entire disk. So if one crashes my server can continue running windows. I appreciate you advice, and i have read it every where on the net. DONT USE FAKE RAID. I dont know why intel invests to much time into putting it on thier boards then? – Zapnologica – 2014-04-30T17:02:36.173

@Zapnologica Please see the updated answer. I also don’ṯ think some cheap software RAID is that much of an effort to Intel or anyone. It’s simply another selling point. – Daniel B – 2014-04-30T18:20:06.927

@DanielB So if I just add a mirror to every partition it will essentially be the same as mirroring the disks? Will the 2nd still boot then? as I dont believe its mbr etc will be synced? – Zapnologica – 2014-04-30T19:08:39.207

Dunno. The boot partition (the 100 MB thingy) doesn’t appear to be a “Dynamic Partition”, so I guess not. The OS itself would still be there, though. Creating another boot loader is trivial with the bcdboot command, but I don’t know how to create a partition like this on a Dynamic Disk. – Daniel B – 2014-04-30T19:17:04.097

So I should probably let all the partitions sync, the remove disk 0 create the mbr for disk1 check it boots then plug both back in? – Zapnologica – 2014-04-30T19:19:35.900

Asked: 2014-04-28T17:42:20.653

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Active: 2014-04-30T18:18:47.647