Mirrored Drives in XP Pro

Hello,

I have recently installed two new SATA drives and Windows XP Pro SP1a. On
the system drive I have partitioned 3 partitions. When I go into Disk
Manager, I am unable to mirror the first drive to the second. I have made
the second drive dynamic but not the first. When I right click the second
drive and choose new volume, the choices default to "simple", "spanned" and
"striped" are both grayed out and mirrored is not an option.

Please advise,

Rusty Hundt, MCSE

Mirroring hds actually is "RAID".To set up a RAID set,if the pc has the
option to
do so,it gets enabled in the BIOS,then a post BIOS RAID configuration utility
runs to set up a RAID set..Usually done before xp is installed,then the F6
option,
then install OS..From where youre at,try downloading or installing from pc
cd,
the RAID software,if you run intel,matrix storage software would be the
answer..

"Rusty" wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have recently installed two new SATA drives and Windows XP Pro SP1a. On
> the system drive I have partitioned 3 partitions. When I go into Disk
> Manager, I am unable to mirror the first drive to the second. I have made
> the second drive dynamic but not the first. When I right click the second
> drive and choose new volume, the choices default to "simple", "spanned" and
> "striped" are both grayed out and mirrored is not an option.
>
> Please advise,
>
> Rusty Hundt, MCSE

Mirroring in Device Manager isn't RAID as such, it is software mirroring.
This works on single partitions, not whole disks. To use it, select an
existing partition, press Ctrl and click on free space of at least equal
size. You should see the option to mirror the partition into the free space.

There are two types of RAID, that achieved by software, and that achieved by
a hardware controller. That achieved by a hardware controller is the 'proper'
kind, and this won't be visible in Device Manager, because the process is
transparent to the OS, which sees the array as one disk.

"Rusty" wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have recently installed two new SATA drives and Windows XP Pro SP1a. On
> the system drive I have partitioned 3 partitions. When I go into Disk
> Manager, I am unable to mirror the first drive to the second. I have made
> the second drive dynamic but not the first. When I right click the second
> drive and choose new volume, the choices default to "simple", "spanned" and
> "striped" are both grayed out and mirrored is not an option.
>