RAID 1 on XP Pro - unable to mirror

[OldRoy]

I'm part way into my first ever complete build - I'm using an aBit 35 Pro board. I made the RAID driver disc as instructed and installed it during the o/s installation. I don't really understand whether this is required in order to generate the Win version of RAID or not. The aBit documentation is quite useless on this.

I am currently trying to mirror a pair of Samsung 500 Gb drives. I have the o/s on drive 0 and an unallocated partition on drive 1. Both are converted to Dynamic Drives (whatever that means) as suggested in the help files. Drive 0 is in simple mode. In theory right-click on drive 0 should reveal the "add mirror" option, but it's greyed out.

As per the help file I checked that there is enough space on this drive for the mirroring, and there is ("properties").

In the UnHelp files there is also confusion caused by the fact that in another section "Create Mirror...", where the requirement for Dynamic Volumes (or summat) is described, it also says that mirroring is only available on Win 2K server variants of the o/s. Which I KNOW is not true.

Can anyone help please? I'm on my third day trying to build this box and getting weary (old age).

[8bit]

What you're trying to do there is create a software RAID1 mirror-set under Windows and if I remember correctly XP doesn't support that, only server versions of Windows do.

The RAID driver disk you used during windows install was presumably for the motherboard's integrated disk controller to run in RAID mode. This will allow you to create a RAID 1 mirror set using the hardware controller. How you go about doing that will be explained in your motherboard manual (or should do at least), usually it's achieved by pressing some key when prompted to during the initial boot-up sequence just after you power on the machine, before the WIndows XP loading screen appears. Some newer motherboards allow you to create arrays from within the BIOS settings screen itself.

Normally you'd have to create the array before installing Windows so I don't know if you'll be able to boot up the current install of XP after you create the array as the disk ID may have changed. Once the array is created and XP is installed and running it will just see the array as a single disk, the controller on the motherboard handles all that stuff.

You won't need to have your disks in Dynamic mode to do this and to be honest I've never found any reason in XP to use disks in dynamic mode, if you can I'd recommend reverting them to basic mode.