Yes back up everything before you create your RAID!
Dynamic Storage Terms:
A volume is a storage unit made from free space on one or more disks. It can
be formatted with a file system and assigned a drive letter. Volumes on
dynamic disks can have any of the following layouts: simple, spanned,
mirrored, striped, or RAID-5.
A simple volume uses free space from a single disk. It can be a single
region on a disk or consist of multiple, concatenated regions. A simple
volume can be extended within the same disk or onto additional disks. If a
simple volume is extended across multiple disks, it becomes a spanned volume.
A spanned volume is created from free disk space that is linked together
from multiple disks. You can extend a spanned volume onto a maximum of 32
disks. A spanned volume cannot be mirrored and is not fault-tolerant.
A striped volume is a volume whose data is interleaved across two or more
physical disks. The data on this type of volume is allocated alternately and
evenly to each of the physical disks. A striped volume cannot be mirrored or
extended and is not fault-tolerant. Striping is also known as RAID-0.
A mirrored volume is a fault-tolerant volume whose data is duplicated on two
physical disks. All of the data on one volume is copied to another disk to
provide data redundancy. If one of the disks fails, the data can still be
accessed from the remaining disk. A mirrored volume cannot be extended.
Mirroring is also known as RAID-1.
A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume whose data is striped across an
array of three or more disks. Parity (a calculated value that can be used to
reconstruct data after a failure) is also striped across the disk array. If a
physical disk fails, the portion of the RAID-5 volume that was on that failed
disk can be re-created from the remaining data and the parity. A RAID-5
volume cannot be mirrored or extended.
The system volume contains the hardware-specific files that are needed to
load Windows (for example, Ntldr, Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com). The system
volume can be, but does not have to be, the same as the boot volume.
The boot volume contains the Windows operating system files that are located
in the %Systemroot% and %Systemroot%\System32 folders. The boot volume can
be, but does not have to be, the same as the system volume.
Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then
double-click Computer Management.
In the left pane, click Disk Management.
In the lower-right pane, right-click the basic disk that you want to
convert, and then click Convert to Dynamic Disk.
NOTE:You must right-click the gray area that contains the disk title on the
left side of the Details pane. For example, right-click Disk 0.
Select the check box that is next to the disk that you want to convert (if
it is not already selected), and then click OK.
Click Details if you want to view the list of volumes in the disk.
Click Convert.
Click Yes when you are prompted to convert the disk, and then click OK
Good Luck! RAID (JMO) is not very reliable. Why not purchase bigger HD's
then use them in JBOD?
--
Computer/Software Tech.
Make it a great day!
Charles Richmond
