How To Mirror A Windows 7 Hard Drive

How to Mirror a Windows 7 Hard Drive

Mirroring a hard drive is an important data protection technique that creates a duplicate of your primary hard drive on a secondary hard drive. This ensures that if your primary hard drive fails, you have a backup of your data that you can access from the secondary hard drive. Windows 7 has a built-in tool that allows you to mirror your hard drive, and the process is relatively simple.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you will need the following:

* Two hard drives: one primary hard drive and one secondary hard drive * A SATA or IDE cable to connect the secondary hard drive * Windows 7 operating system installed on the primary hard drive

Steps

To mirror a hard drive in Windows 7, follow these steps:

1. Connect the secondary hard drive to your computer using a SATA or IDE cable. 2. Open the Disk Management utility. To do this, click on the Start menu, type "diskmgmt.msc" in the search bar, and press Enter. 3. Initialize the secondary hard drive. Right-click on the secondary hard drive in the Disk Management utility and select "Initialize Disk". Choose the GPT or MBR partition style, and then click "OK". 4. Create a new simple volume on the secondary hard drive. Right-click on the unallocated space on the secondary hard drive and select "New Simple Volume". Follow the on-screen instructions to create a new volume. 5. Open the Disk Management console. To do this, click on the Start menu, type "diskmgmt.msc" in the search bar, and press Enter. 6. Right-click on the primary hard drive and select "Add Mirror". 7. Select the secondary hard drive you want to use as the mirror and click "OK". 8. The mirroring process will begin and may take several hours to complete.

Conclusion

Once the mirroring process is complete, you will have a duplicate of your primary hard drive on the secondary hard drive. If your primary hard drive fails, you can boot from the secondary hard drive and continue working as if nothing happened. Mirroring your hard drive is an important data protection technique that can save you a lot of time and heartache in the event of a hard drive failure.