Moving Win7 mirrored HDDs (software RAID1) to a new PC

[Mr Matt]

I lost my motherboard so I'm going to use this opportunity to upgrade from Win7 32bit to Win7 64bit. I will be upgrading the motherboard and the CPU but keeping the original OS SSD drive.

My problem is that I was using 2x 3GB HDDs as data storage and they were configured as a mirrored drive by my old Win7 32bit system. If I now format the OS SSD and install win7 64bit to use with the new motherboard and CPU how do I import the RAID1 drive so that it is all the same as it was before?

I don't want to break the RAID or have to format either (or both) of the drives as the data is important, and I no longer have the old system to be able to read the RAID or change the setup anyway.

I just wanted to ask before I do the format what the procedure is to use the 2 HDDs in the previous RAID1 config in a new build as there is little information about this on the website.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Mr Matt]

Quick update, I installed the new motherboard and CPU and the old win7 32bit OS boots up fine so I can still access the RAID1 drives at this time. This means I am able to change any of the settings before migrating to the new OS if needed.

Is there anything I can do now to make it easier to setup the same RAID on the new OS?

 

[Mr Matt]

OK, another question, instead of using Win7 RAID on my new build, can I now break the Mirror and it will give me 2 independent normal drives each containing the same data?

If so, how do I do this in my old OS config without losing any data?

I'm now thinking of just manually backing up all of the data to both drives in the future and not using RAID again.

Cheers.

 

[Mr Matt]

So thanks for all your help (!) and here's what happened in the end;

I installed win7 64 bit onto a partition of the original win7 32 bit OS drive so I could dual boot. I could still see and use the RAID in the original OS but the option to remove the disk under Disk Management(as per Microsoft's website) was grayed out so, just for a test, I started the new OS with the RAID still connected as it was in the original OS and the entire RAID was recognised and worked straight away in the Win7 64 OS!

So all that worry for nothing.