Raid your hard drives windows 7

Everything goes fine and RAID 1 is established with no issues. I can start the windows from both of them. When I unplug disk 2 , it works fine. The issue comes in when I have the primary hard drive unplugged. It can't boot anywhere. I tried to use tools like Gparted live to boot and then change the boot. Unfortunately from windows 7 there is no boot. I tried to use the BCD tool inside Windows recovery disk. So my question is that how would you deal with this issue in this scenario?

I also ran the windows 7 disk and did a repair, it didn't help either. In a summary if I have the main hard drive unplugged , can't boot to windows any longer.

My understanding was that I should deal with two different things:. The boot sequence from BIOS. I changed it to second hard drive and it didn't work. Technically BIOS tries to boot from second hard drive but simply it can't find the boot loader. The boot loader in the second hard drive. I beleive there should be a way for doing that. I had the first hard drive plugged off , then tried to boot to the windows.

I found another "Secondary plex" has been added. So I had 1. Windows 7 2. Secondary plex 3. Secondary Plex. When I booted to 3 everything worked fine. When I attached the 1st hard drive again, the 3 disappeared and I had two options: 1. Windows 7 worked , but Secondary plex didn't work.

I couldn't understand why, i wish I could. Best VPN. Browse All News Articles. Windows 11 Uninstall Clock. Teams Walkie-Talkie. PCI Express 6. Wordle Scams. T-Mobile iCloud Private Relay. Avira Antivirus Crypto Miner. Linux PinePhone Pro. Google Green Messages. Use Your iPhone as a Webcam.

Hide Private Photos on iPhone. All Microsoft's PowerToys for Windows. Take Screenshot by Tapping Back of iPhone. Windows 11 Default Browser. Browse All Windows Articles. Windows 10 Annual Updates. OneDrive Windows 7 and 8. Do I need to format a new SSD? Actually, when you get a new SSD, you need to format it in most cases. How do I boot from formatted hard drive? Ensure you are connected to the internet. Restart your computer. Select "Disk Utility" from the boot menu.

Select your hard drive from the list on the left. Choose your file system. Give your drive a name. Format the drive. How do you format SSD with Windows on it? Moved the whole directory over to " Program Files ", changed the settings in the desktop icon and all is thumbs up now. You need 2 drives with identical size preferably also in identical brands and models to form the RAID group.

Windows 7 Home Premium does not support drive mirroring. From your post, I feel I must emphasize OS mirroring has absolutley nothing to do with drivers, controllers, your BIOS, your firmware, or anything else related to your hardware.

I use a family desktop to manage files, software, movies, and music. Windows 7 allowed me to mirror raid1 the 1. I installed my operating system onto the GB drive I keep all my software and OS on a small drive, and then I create a clone of this small system drive using Acronis, as a fail safe in case my OS becomes corrupt, I just pop in my little back up drive, and good as new.

Then I attached my two 1. I restarted my system. Then click Disk Management under Storage on the left. My primary disk is Disk 0 c: , and the two new 1. I just chose disk 1 and 2 to be mirrored, and assigned a drive letter F:. It seems to be working fine. During this build, I came across a neat installer app that automatically loads all of the little free apps which can take a while to install like ccleaner, chrome, vlc, and many others.

I think you might find it a time saver when building a new system. Hope this doesn't unduly upset any folks that have been struggling with this topic for a while, but I just set up a mirrored volume on Window 7 Ultimate bit using 2 identical 1Tb Seagate SATA drives and the whole process took less than 90 seconds. Tip: don't recall if they mentioned this format both drives, then remove the volumes from both in the DiskManager.

Right click on the first drive and you will get the option to create a mirror and get asked for the location of the mirror the second drive. And don't forget the part about being able to give more money to Microsoft because only the Professional or Ultimate level of Windows 7 supports RAID 0 or 1. This fixed my problem. I shrank the volume by only 1MB and Add Mirror appeared. This is a Windows7 glitch. I have had the same two disks mirrored in the past without the need to have a spare 1MB.

I had 2 identical disks originally partitioned and formatted as a mirrored pair on a Windows XP Pro system. That system was upgraded to Vista and the mirror imported.

Since then the disks were moved to a new Win7-Ultimate system and again imported. All worked fine. When I needed extra space a while back I broke the mirror and used one drive for temporary use. After I'd finished with it I wanted to restore the mirror so deleted the temporary volume but got the dredded grey "add mirror".

To use what is available with Windows 7, you will need to make the two 1. Your total storage will be 1. That should provide the redundancy of the storage that you require utilizing what is available in Windows 7. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Client. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question.