The procedure I would follow is below.

It uses the supposed ability of the Intel ICH5R raid driver and Intel IAA to
create a raid volume while windows is running. I suggest you download the
latest Intel Application Accelerator (IAA) from Intel and read the Help File
before proceding. Check the bios settings section of the mobo manual too.

0. Take a drive image using either ghost, Drive Image or whatever is your
choice. If the online raid mirror create fails, your regression step will be
to do the process as you would have done anyway - you will manually create a
RAID 1 config and restore this image onto the new RAID 1 volume. You will
not lose any time doing this as all these steps (except attempting the
online raid 1 create) should / must be done anyway.

1. Check bios verion: is it the most recent stable?
If not, are later versions refered to as pre-requisites for raid driver
update?
If so then you will have to update bios.

2. Check raid driver at the asus site. If a more recent (IE 3.5 or 3.51
version driver) is there and you are not running it then upgrade - check
readme, notes & required bios comments. Make a raid driver floppy disc -
check it.

3. Upgrade the IAA either from asus or from intel downloads. There is a new
version 4.1 out which is mainly aimed at the new ICH6R equiped boards but is
also an update for ICH5R boards. Install that - it is an improvement on the
older version & actually has some readable documentation now. The older IAA
install would not let you install if the ICH5R was not configured as raid
(it would complain about EB chip instead of ER chip - all that means is the
raid controller is either disabled or set as Non Raid in bios). If this
happens, you will need to install IAA after step 5 and before step 6.

4b. shut down, add the new disc drive. Go into bios and configure the bios
Intel RAID as RAID. At this point you will need to have the RAID drivers
installed into XP otherwise it will BSOD - that is next step - do not boot
this config until you are ready to do a repair install. While in the BIOS
set the boot order so CD is first as Repair is next step. Later you will
need to revise your boot order as you will now be booting off a RAID
controller which is sometimes regarded as a SCSI controller.

4c. Perform a windows XP repair. During repair press F6 at the earliest
opportunity and load the intel raid drivers. Leave the floppy with the
drivers on in the drive until the system reboots. If you are not familiar
with Repair installs, then do some research or ask back here. Some believe
Repairs are error prone - but it is only error prone on flakey systems and
for people that don't know how to do one.

5. boot into windows. Ignore raid during boot.

6. fire up IAA and using the online help, create your raid 1 volume and let
it synchonise. This will take an hour per 100GB or so - perhaps a lot
longer.

7. If this does not work as per IAA documentation, then it will likely fail
in the first few seconds, so shut down and create the raid 1 manually and
restore the image created in Step 0. onto the raid volume. Follow the XP
repair procedure above so that the raid drivers are installed into Windows
XP.

8. Don't forget to check your boot menu and boot order when doing the XP
Repair and going to RAID boot.


HTH
- Tim



"Mr Mister" wrote in message
...
PS, I also have an A7N8Xe-d that I want to do this with; is the proceedure
much different?


"Mr Mister" wrote in message
...
I have a current working WinXP installation on a P4P800e Deluxe with
Seagate
160Gb SATA drive, and I want to add another identical drive to create a
RAID
1 mirror. I need to avoid losing data or bootability on my current
drive.
Last time I tried this on a P4P800-d, I lost access and had to reinstall.

What is the best proceedure to add 2nd SATA drive and create RAID1 while
not
destroying the parent drive?

Thanks.