Windows 7 Mirroring Drive Failure

Question

I had a few questions when a drive fails that is setup with software RAID 1 in Windows 7, e.g. Dynamic disk mirroring:

1. Will it still boot using the good drive (assuming boot drive is RAID 1), or does will the bad drive need to be replaced before the system can be used?
2. What is the process to replace the bad drive? Do I need to break the mirroring and recreate it? Or is it smart enough allow you keep the settings and select the drive to be part of the mirror?

Answer 1

If you remove the dead drive, the system should boot if you're using RAID 1. Otherwise, there would be no point to software RAID 1 on Windows 7. Once you have a new drive, just add it (since it doesn't have a signature on it put there by Windows, it will know it's a new drive). I don't know the exact procedure for adding the new drive into the RAID 1 array, on software RAID in Windows 7, but it shouldn't be too hard.