I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 system with a single hard drive, and I have a spare hard drive of same size/model that's not being used. I was thinking about dropping in the new drive and setting it up as RAID 1 (mirroring) to achieve poor man's fault tolerance.
In previous versions of Windows, booting from a software RAID partition was painful or impossible. What about Windows Server 2008 R2? Can I easily (without reinstalling the OS) switch from a standalone boot disk to a RAID 1 pair? If yes, I'm looking for some info:
- How to set up my boot disk for RAID 1?
- If one drive fails, how (what windows commands/tools) to get back to a bootable state?
- Are there any drawbacks (as compared to having only one disk) to using software RAID 1 in Win 2008 R2?
This question is similar, but its acepted answer has no details about how (what windows tools/commands) to recover after a failure of one drive, nor how to set it up. From Google, I found a lot of answers-- many contradictory and most out-of-date. Hence the new question here.
The machine is a Dell Vostro 430 with the stock disk controller (without on-board hardware RAID, AFAIK), if that matters.
BTW, I know that the right thing to do here is to use a hardware RAID controller, but my hardware budget is maxed so I need to make do what what I have (for now at least). When i next rebuild this box, I'll add hardware RAID -- just trying to make do until then.