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I was playing with getting rid of my BIOS RAID 0 and using AHCI. This would destroy the RAID 0 meaning I'd have to create a software RAID with Windows.

After converting to AHCI and doing a clean install of Windows, however, I was unable to do so in Disk Management.Both drives are identical, except the C:\ had the OS on it. It shows the other drive as unallocated space. The option for creating a striped or spanned volume is not available.

I shrunk the C:\ to have more unallocated space on the drive with the OS. This presented a few issues:

  1. Right-clicking the unallocated space on either drive, the striped volume was no clickable. However, the Window that comes up didn't allow me to select the other drive's unallocated space.
  2. Spanned volume was now also clickable, but same thing: couldn't select the unallocated space on the other drive.

Is what I was trying to do even possible (shrinking the C:\ and combing that unallocated space with a 2nd unallocaed drive)? If so, what am I doing wrong?

Would it make any difference if unallocated the space on the C:\ during install of the OS as opposed to using Disk Manager after the install?

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From what I’ve read, striped volumes have to be created from two or more, equally sized, unused portions of your disks.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2003/cc758035(v=ws.10)#types-of-raid-volumes

You can’t use it for a boot volume with Windows on it, because you have to create the striped volume after Windows is running and you can’t use allocated space in a striped volume.

RAID at the hardware level (configured in BIOS or motherboard RAID manager) is usually preferable to using Windows software RAID anyways.

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Ok, figured it out.

  1. In Windows, in Disk Management > View > Top > Disk List.

  2. Right clicked both discs and converted to "Dynamic". (Thought it was screw up the OS, but it converts that partition to Simple).

  3. Then I could span or stripe the two unallocated spaces on the different physical drives by right-clicking on them and selecting what I wanted to do.

  4. Then just add the other volume to the new volume.

In my case, I had to do span because it would have resulted in more unallocated space given that stripe has to be the same size.

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