I have found some old refs to this which are unsatisfactorily resolved (or not). I want to add an identical drive to my boot drive, to make a Wondows Raid 0 (my Asus motherboard allows all devices raid0 or none). I would rather not rebuild from the ground up, it would be horrendous. I want to simply backup my system, put in the new disc, somehow get into W7 to set up the Raid 0, then restore my system. There have been counter views expressed on the viability and procedure, I rather hope that by now someone will have done this and can advise. If you have only theories, please make that clear, I do not want to messed up by guesswork, even though I welcome theoretical advice in the absence of experiencedumbo knowall

I want to add an identical drive to my boot drive, to make a Wondows Raid 0 (my Asus motherboard allows all devices raid0 or none). I would rather not rebuild from the ground up, it would be horrendous. I want to simply backup my system, put in the new disc, somehow get into W7 to set up the Raid 0, then restore my system. dumbo knowall You cannot add another HDD and just have windows turn on RAID 0. At least not that I know of. Here's what I would do. 1. Make and image of my HDD. 2. Add HDD 3. In BIOS or Asus' utility make a raid 0 with the 2 HDD. 4. Restore the image to the HDD

I haven't done it. However, you have two ways of making an array: the motherboard's RAID controller, or in Windows. If you create an array using the motherboard controller, all data on the disks will be lost when you create the array. (That's done in the BIOS setup, under a special RAID BIOS. It's not set up in Windows, which will see the array as a single entity.) I don't know whether the same is true of a Windows software RAID array, but I'm fairly sure that you can't boot from a software array. It may be possible to back up your current drive, build the RAID array, and restore to it. There may be some trouble with drivers, although Windows 7 may already include them, depending on what your motherboard's chipset is. (The AHCI drivers in Win7 worked fine with my Intel X58/ICH10R system. I believe that Win7 contains RAID drivers that support the ICH10R controller, as well.) Good luck.