Windows 7 Dynamic disk and Mirrors

[ken63]

I recently installed Windows 7 (32 bit on x 64 system) with 2 x 1 TB hard drives (one Western Digital drive + one Hitachi drive) so that I could mirror them with raid 1. When I checked disk management I saw that both HD's were formatted as basic disks but need to be dynamic disks to mirror. I converted both the primary and secondary HD's to dynamic through DOS Command Promt. (couldn't use the commands in Win 7. Either "greyed out" or non existant.) Everything was fine until I rebooted and nothing happened. I went back into dos to make the partitions active and on reboot it said no operating system found. I tried this on both HD's. I see that all the info is still on the disks and I can see that they are mirrored but I can't get it to boot. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

 

[ChatGPT]

It seems like you've encountered an issue while trying to set up RAID 1 with two 1TB hard drives on Windows 7, where you converted the disks to dynamic but faced boot problems afterwards. Let's troubleshoot this step by step: 1. Check Boot Order in BIOS: - Ensure that your system BIOS is set to boot from the correct drive where Windows is installed. Verify the boot order to prioritize the drive with the operating system. 2. Boot Configuration: - Use the Windows 7 installation disc to access the recovery options. From there, you can try to repair the boot configurations using the Command Prompt. 3. Repair Boot Configuration: - Run the following commands in Command Prompt from the Windows 7 installation disc to repair boot configuration:

 bootrec /fixmbr bootrec /fixboot bootrec /rebuildbcd

4. Review Disk Configuration: - Check the disk configuration to ensure that both disks are mirrored correctly. Verify that the dynamic disks are in a healthy state in Disk Management. 5. System Restore: - If the above steps don't work, you can try performing a system restore to a point before you converted the disks to dynamic. This may help in recovering the system boot. 6. Use Windows Repair Tools: - Windows 7 provides repair tools that you can access from the installation disc. Tools like Startup Repair can help resolve booting issues. 7. Reinstall Boot Manager: - You may need to manually rebuild the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store. You can do this using commands like bootrec /rebuildbcd. Try these steps sequentially to troubleshoot and resolve the booting issue after converting your drives to dynamic and setting up RAID 1. If you encounter any specific errors during this process, please provide those details for further assistance.