#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR HOW TO#
#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR LICENSE KEY#
#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR UPGRADE#

Protip 2 – if you don’t have an extra disk big enough to hold the data from your existing array, you can use one of your disks as the source but you have to do a couple of additional steps.

If it’s a Windows Dynamic Disk, unRAID won’t be able to mount it (neither can much else). You can check what type of disk it is by looking in the Windows Disk Management console.

Protip 1 – make sure the temporary drive you’re copying to is not a Windows Dynamic Disk.

We’ll use this as the source data to copy to the newly created unRAID array.In my case, I had a 4TB drive that I could copy my 1.5TB of RAID data onto temporarily so I could later use those 1.5TB drives for my unRAID array.Some tips:

This has to be a drive you won’t be using as part of the initial 2-disk unRAID.

Copy the data from the Windows RAID to a temporary (NTFS) drive.

Make sure this PC is listed under your Microsoft Account Devices

#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR LICENSE KEY#

Once you re-install Windows later, you’ll be able to log in using the same Microsoft Account and adopt this license key on your newly installed Windows 10 machine. If your device isn’t there, then you should get that resolved before you move on. If you’ve done that right, you should see your PC listed when you log into and look in the Devices tab. The easiest way to keep the key is to create an Admin user that logs in using a Microsoft Account credentials.

#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR UPGRADE#

If you took advantage of the free Windows 10 upgrade, it’s really easy to lose that free upgrade if you don’t save your license key.

Save your Windows license key. If you have Windows 10, this is really really important.

I like Crashplan for cloud and on-site location backups. Getting a good backup is really more important than this. If you don’t, just stop reading right here and get one. You should already have a 3-2-1 Backup Strategy. This is a good time to remind yourself that RAID is not a backup strategy. These instructions assume you have a Vista-or-later Windows machine with two-disks in a Windows-managed software RAID mirrored configuration.

#WINDOWS 10 RAID MONITOR HOW TO#

It’ll help to have a passing understanding of what an unRAID array and share is, and it’s a pretty good reference for how to do a general unRAID installation. More on that below.īefore you get started, it might be good to familiarize yourself with the unRAID manual. The 4TB “Security Recordings” disk is used to hold my IP cam footage from my security software – I made space on that disk to temporarily hold the data from my RAID while I was doing the upgrade. Yours is likely different.Īll of this is running on a 5 year old ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 motherboard with an Intel Core i5-2500k processor and 16GB of RAM. Below are some guidelines and step-by-step instructions that will hopefully help if you’re in the same situation. When I started looking at converting my Windows 10 Pro machine (which was running a two-disk, software RAID 1 in Windows) to an unRAID machine I didn’t find a lot of good how-to guides.

Windows 10 raid monitor