Windows 7 - system mirror onto non-NTFS format HDD

hi,

I have a new windows 7 64-bit computer and two 4-year old external Western Digital HDDs. They connect fine and transfer data okay except when i try to do a Windows system mirror.

All was well with XP Pro and the same HDDs but Windows 7 tells me the HDDs are not formatted to NTFS.

Firstly, what does this mean as i would really like a system mirror and secondly, is there a way round it withpout formatting the HDDs and losing all the data?

I'm not an expert so please keep replies simple!

cheers
Andy

I may be wrong, because I avoid software RAID like the plague, but I was under the impression the drives had to be dynamic for this to work, instead of the default basic. I also was under the impression you would need one source drive, and one identical blank drive in order to set up the mirroring.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it shouldn't be a big deal for you to blank one of the drives, especially if they had been mirrored before, right? Shouldn't they be identical, in terms of content?

sorry but i don't really understand this. However i forgot to mention in the original text that i had used Drive Image 7.1 as s/w to create the mirror on XP Pro. Maybe i should just buy Ghost?

1. Don't buy Ghost (I used it for 3 years). But there are better free progems - e,g, this one: Imaging with free Macrium

2. What is the format of the disks now. If it is Fat32, you will have problems (although Macrium images to Fat32, but it is messy). Move the data off and format it in NTFS, then put the data back.

hi again,

I don't know what FAT32 is but if that is the alternative to NTFS, then the HDDs are formatted in that.

Both HDDs are identical in terms of the data loaded so i could format one as NTFS and load the data back from the other.

What are FAT32 and NTFS? Are they like operating systems and will the data work on both types? I have 100Gb of photos that i don't want to lose !

thanks
Andy

They are the blocksizes formatted on the disk: http://www.diffen.com/difference/FAT32_vs_NTFS

I don't think you had a mirrored array, to be honest, or else you'd know what I was talking about. It sounds more like you had one drive, and then manually made copies/images of the one drive to the other. If so, that isn't mirroring at all.