Rebuild a Precision 7550 With Win 10 Pro with Raid 1
I've just taken delivery of a Precision 7550 and want to remove the unused or booted 512GB M2 and load up two 2 TB M2 hard drives in RAID 1 mode and build a new Win 10 Pro from a Dell OS recovery USB.
What are the best steps to take and partitions to use (or Windows default) and what Win Activation issues will I find to overcome?
By removing the factory fitted Win 10 Pro OS Hard drive M2, I figured I had this in case of any failure. I did'nt want to use MS user rather use Local Use only.
@Baytowerman The default Windows partition layout is fine. If you want to customize it for something like having a separate Data partition apart from your OS partition, which can be convenient especially if you perform images backups and might want to be able to roll back your OS without rolling back your data, you can do that, but you don't need to do anything special just because of the RAID 1. Are you familiar with how to create a RAID 1 virtual disk using the firmware-level Intel Rapid Storage Management application? I tend to prefer to set that up before installing an OS, and at least in the past that was required, although it does seem that newer Intel Rapid Storage applications that you can run within Windows can perform an in-place migration of a single-disk Windows installation over to a RAID 1 setup that you'd define within Windows.
If the system came from the factory with a Windows 10 license, then you shouldn't have any activation issues even after changing drives and even if you choose not to use a Microsoft account for your Windows logon.
I personally would go with regular Microsoft Win10 install media rather than Dell's though. But that's a personal preference.
Thanks jphugan, I can agree on the Raid situation some years ago, I used to set that up first but that was on the older M6800/M6600 series. The now UEFI and Windows 10 obviously has improved so thanks for the tip and also the Windows media rather than Dell.
I have 3 work stations to do so hopefully all will go OK.
Thanks for taking time to reply.
Dave
jphughan
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Posted April 27th, 2021 07:00
@Baytowerman The default Windows partition layout is fine. If you want to customize it for something like having a separate Data partition apart from your OS partition, which can be convenient especially if you perform images backups and might want to be able to roll back your OS without rolling back your data, you can do that, but you don't need to do anything special just because of the RAID 1. Are you familiar with how to create a RAID 1 virtual disk using the firmware-level Intel Rapid Storage Management application? I tend to prefer to set that up before installing an OS, and at least in the past that was required, although it does seem that newer Intel Rapid Storage applications that you can run within Windows can perform an in-place migration of a single-disk Windows installation over to a RAID 1 setup that you'd define within Windows.
If the system came from the factory with a Windows 10 license, then you shouldn't have any activation issues even after changing drives and even if you choose not to use a Microsoft account for your Windows logon.
I personally would go with regular Microsoft Win10 install media rather than Dell's though. But that's a personal preference.