Mirroring on Windows XP Pro

[ppuddick]

Hi everyone,

There is probably a simple answer to this question.

I have 2 80Gb Hard disks. My first hard disk has Windows XP Pro installed on it, the second disk has nothing. I would like to mirror my first drive to my second drive.

I have gone into Disk Management through the mmc and made both disks dynamic. If I right click on the first drive I can see the option to "Add Mirro" but this is greyed out.

Am I missing something. Any help would be much appreciated. I know I would be better off in the long run getting an IDE RAID Controller - but I can't afford it right now and would like to do this more as an experiment than anything else.

I have researched this both on technet and across the web but I'm really stumped on this one. Can anyone please help?

Thank you in advance

 

[soaplover]

Notes

To open command prompt, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.
You can create mirrored volumes only on computers running Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
You need at least two dynamic disks to create a mirrored volume.
Mirrored volumes are fault tolerant and use RAID-1, which provides redundancy by creating two identical copies of a volume.
Mirrored volumes cannot be extended or striped.
Both copies (mirrors) of the mirrored volume share the same drive letter.



//Regards Soaplover

 

[bcastner]

XP does not natively support a software RAID "mirror."

You would have to add a controller, and use its driver.

I hope you realize you cannot revert a dynamic disk without a format. And, to use the drives with a RAID controller likely means they will have to be formatted again.

If it was my choice I would use the drives as data drives, and use a good image backup program. The new release of Drive Image v.2i has the ability to automaticly synchronize an image source to its image, and this sounds like a fair solution for you.