A client of ours has a server with a built-in RAID controller that seems to be failing. The server is due to be replaced soon, but until then we had to come up with a “quickfix” over the weekend.

First, we took a good backup with Windows Server Backup.

Then we went into the BIOS of the server and changed the hard drive controller from RAID to AHCI. We also used this opportunity to swap in a couple of SSDs instead of the old Spindles.

Then we put the boot media in and went through the repair process until we got to the Restore option. We restored from the good backup onto one of the SSDs. Then booted into Windows. We had to boot into SAFE-MODE first, but every boot afterwards was fine.

In the Disk Management tool, we had to convert both SSDs to “Dynamic” by right-clicking the Disk0 and Disk1 area on the left.

After both disks are set as Dynamic, you right-click the C: partition and select “add-mirror”. This will then convert Disk1 into an exact replica of Disk0. Note that it may be confusing that you only add a mirror to the C: partition and not the whole Disk.

It will take a while as the “Resynching” process copies all of the data from Disk0 to Disk1.

If Disk0 fails in the future, you will need to boot into Recovery and change the Boot.ini ARC path to point to the Disk1 partition instead of Disk0.

This will get us by for a few months until the new Server is ready and it will be a welcome speed boost until then!