Taurus

okay, i have two identical drives that i want to set up in a raid 1 (mirror) array. one drive has lots of valuable data on it that i don't want to lose. the other drive is blank with no partitions set that i want the data to be backed up to. if i go into my raid bios and add them to an array, it prompts me with, "all data on new (or added) disks will be overwritten. continue?" and if i choose "yes" then it asks, "clear MBR?". i have hit "no" at that point and it still shows the array as healthy in the raid bios, but windows is unable to install a new device and the drives don't show up in disk management.

i really don't want to lose the data on the first disk so will choosing "yes" clear it? or just the blank second disk? i don't have another drive big enough for everything to backup onto. had anyone done this?

this on a 7050/630a chipset with the latest chipset drives installed.

LordOfLA

choose yes will just erase the mbr and partition table it wont actually erase the disks but you won't be able to recover the data and use it in RAID1. You will need to backup the imortant data before jumping to RAID1 with the bios.

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Taurus

hm, okay. i started doing that last night anyway. i deleted as much as i didn't need and split the rest between 3 different computers.

what's weird is just a couple weeks ago i added a hd to my dad's comp and mirrored his existing system drive with no problems. i don't remember what options i picked in the raid bios.