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Since my HDD possibly might give out soon and I don't want to have to go through the process of setting everything up again, I was thinking of getting a secondary HDD to mirror my data onto with a RAID 1 configuration. My question though, is if I can set this up without losing my data already on my original HDD.

I've got a ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 motherboard, and a 1TB Seagate HDD.

Thanks in advance for the help!

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    What OS are you running?
    – rob
    Nov 18, 2013 at 17:29
  • @piani - Are we talking about a hardware or software raid? Why don't you just backup your data before you attempt to do anything?
    – Ramhound
    Nov 18, 2013 at 17:39
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    @rob I'm running Windows 7. I will be backing up my data, but I still wanted to see if there was a way to set one up without formatting a drive.
    – npiani
    Nov 18, 2013 at 18:38

2 Answers 2

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It depends on your RAID solution. Many RAID solutions format a disk when constructing a RAID or adding a new disk.

Desktop versions of Windows have a built-in software RAID capability which will attempt to preserve your data during conversion. However, you should still back up your data in case something goes wrong.

  1. Start Disk Management. Press Win+r, then type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter
  2. Right-click on your data disk, click Convert to Dynamic Disk, and go through the wizard.
  3. Right-click on your data disk, click New Mirrored Volume, and go through the wizard.
  4. Right-click on your new disk, click Add Mirror, and go through the wizard. (Note: the "new" disk must be a dynamic disk and must be unallocated. If it already has partitions, you must delete them first.)

See HowToGeek for more detailed instructions and screenshots (but ignore the article's title--RAID1/mirroring is NOT a backup!).

disk management

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  • Awesome! I'll go ahead and try this out. I'd read you could use the Disk Manager for it but hadn't tried. I'd give you an upvote as well but my reputation is too low still!
    – npiani
    Nov 18, 2013 at 20:06
  • I tried it, but the workflow differs slightly from your answer. Since my edit was rejected, I will write it here: (1) Right-click on your data disk, click Convert to Dynamic Disk, and go through the wizard. (2) Right-click on your new disk, click Convert to Dynamic Disk, and go through the wizard. (3) Right-click on the partition on your data disk, which you need to mirror, click Add Mirror, and go through the wizard, select your new disk there. (Note: the "new" disk must be a dynamic disk and must be unallocated. If it already has partitions, you must delete them first.)
    – Andrey Sapegin
    Apr 8, 2016 at 19:49
  • @rob if you already have made a raid 1 mirror pair (array) in your computer (not for windows but pure data), and you later move those hard disks into another computer that has a raid controller supporting raid 1 as well, is it possible just to preserve your raid-with-data? (to continue mirroring)?
    – LowLevel
    Apr 6, 2018 at 7:09
  • For me, there was no "Convert to Dynamic Disk..." option. I had to use "Add Mirror...", as per the linked HowToGeek article.
    – Harry
    Apr 5, 2020 at 10:56
  • @Harry your disk may have already been formatted as a Dynamic Disk/Mirrored Volume. ;)
    – rob
    Apr 13, 2020 at 14:02
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You may use something like Clonezilla, Acronis Trueimage, Norton Ghost or other imaging software out there.

Simply choose your product, create bootable USB/CD/DVD, boot from it, clone your dying drive and boot from your new clone.

No, it's not easily possible to create raid from existing drive.

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