Double up your data

With both new hard drives installed and working, it's time for the final step: transforming your two new drives into an array with a bootable RAID Level 1 configuration.

To begin, restart your computer and enter the RAID BIOS screen by hitting Ctrl+A when prompted during power-up. This will launch the Adaptec RAID-configuration utility. Select Create Array from the menu; you should see two drives listed in the screen's left-hand box. The grayed-out drive shown will be your boot drive. Press Esc to return to the main menu. Hit Configure Drives, then press the Ins key for both drives. All you have to do now is press Enter, then Y, to acknowledge the warning message.

The utility will transfer all the data on your new bootable hard drive over to the second drive and create the mirror. Expect this process to take about as long as it did to configure the first Maxtor drive. When it's done, reboot the machine. Under My Computer, if all went as planned, you'll see the array displayed as just one volume. In the background, however, every bit of your valuable data is being automatically copied across the two hard drives. Even if one drive dies, you'll still be good to go.