Hi, I have a laptop with 2 hard disks and no bios fake raid controller. I would like to created a striped raid array over both drives and use that to boot my machine. Is this possible? Thanks -Tim

Hi Tim, Sorry to say that the answer is No.1.If you would like to use striped(soft) raid, you have to convert the HDDs from basic to dynamic.2.Windows cannot be installed to HDDs if the disk contains any dynamic volumes. I suggest you buy a Win7 compatible RAID controller and try to set a Hard RAID system. Good Luck!

Hi Gordon, Thanks for the reply - I was afraid that might be the answer. Unfortunately, buying a hardware raid controller for my laptop is out of the question. Now I'm wondering, is there a way to boot from a basic drive, say D:, but have the vast majority of I/O go through the raid drive, C:?

Sorry for left out one key point that this is a laptop. Since Windows cannot be installed to HDDs if the disk contains any dynamic volumes/partitions, you can consider use the following work around, install Win7 to basic disk and convert both disks to dynamic for soft RAID:1.Partition the basic disk (HDD0) to two or more partitions.2.Install Win7 to a one of the partition in HDD03.In Win7 disk management, delete all partitions except the system one, create the striped volume and follow the wizard to convert both HDDs to dynamic.PS: you may receive a warning message if you convert the disks to dynamic, you will not be able to start installed operating systems from any volume on the disks (except the current boot volume), if you do not use dual boot systems, its ok to click OK to begin the convert

Thanks again for the reply Gordon. I figured this was the best approach so I have already taken it :) To try and get the most radi0'ness for my money I also moved Program Files and my user profile to the striped disk. It's a shame there is no option to create a bootstrap bootable partition during the Windows installer, similar to how Linux works.