RAID 0 to RAID 1 & DataSafe discs

Going from RAID 0 to RAID 1 will require you to destroy your RAID 0, which as you have foreseen will require you to have an image of your system on other media.  Use the CTRL i set-up screen to reset your hard drives to non-RAID so that you wind up with two independent hard drives.  Once you have done that, use CTRL-i again to set the drives to RAID1.

There is one issue, however, you need to consider.  Your present RAID 0 gives you a RAID volume that is equal to the sum of the capacities of the two component drives.  RAID 1 is a mirror; each drive is a duplicate of the second, and the capacity of the RAID 1 volume made from your existing hard drive will only equal the capacity of one of the existing hard drives.  I am assuming that you made your image using Dell DataSafe Local or possibly the Microsoft Windows back-up tool.  Neither of these tools is capable of altering the volume of an existing image, as would be the case had you used one of the popular disk imaging tools.  If your present image was made from a RAID 0 volume having a single partition that occupied the sum of the capacities of the two component hard drives, it will be necessary to restore to a RAID 1 volume having the same capacity.  You would need to double the size of your existing hard drives to allow this to work.  The only way you get out of doubling the capacity of the hard drives is if your system partition was only one half the total RAID 0 capacity, something that would be true if your RAID 0 had two partitions, no more than one half dedicated to the system partition.

In your position I believe I would purchase two new hard drives to try your experiment.  Label the old drives with the number of the SATA ports that they presently occupy, remove and store them in a safe place, and install two new hard drives, each having double the capacity of the old drives.  You can then make your RAID 1 and restore the system image you have made.

Wow, didn't see that one coming! I'm glad I asked the question and that someone had the knowledge and was willing to add a reply - thanks.

The PC is a new XPS 8300 with 2 x 1TB drives. One of the things leading me to change over to RAID 1 was that I will never fill 1TB.

Now that I know the Dell DataSafe won't install, I'll have to stick with the current setup.

I do, however, have Acronis TrueImage. Do you know if the same restriction applies to an image created with that as with DataSafe? Meanwhile I'll hit the Acronis site to find out more.

Thanks again.

I use Acronis.  I'm not a fan of the Dell datasafe or the built in Windows 7 backup.  

I had a Raid 1 setup (with two 1TB drives) but had a problem with one of the Raid drives after a Microsoft update that corrupted the Raid setup.  Fortunately I had an Acronis backup of one of the drives (since they are both identical only one backup was needed) and I reverted back to just one drive, rebuilt with Acronis.  I now have Win 7 also installed on the second drive, that I dual boot, but I use that for my recording studio machine only - it doesn't go on line.

Since I have Acronis and do regular backups I didn't see the need for a Raid setup.