Can a RAID 1 be created without losing data?

May 22, 2021

Question: 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!

Answer: 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 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.

Start Disk Management. ?Press Win+r, then type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter

Right-click on your data disk, click Convert to Dynamic Disk, and go through the wizard.

Right-click on your data disk, click New Mirrored Volume, and go through the wizard.

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