To be specific, disk mirroring refers to the action of replicating logical disk volumes onto another separate physical hard disk in real time. By doing so, you can ensure continuous availability. That is to say, even if the current local disk is going wrong, you can boot from the mirrored drive to prevent the interruption of operation.
Mirror Boot Drive on Windows 10 for Continuous Availability
As you can see from the name, mirroring drive means to duplicate data and disk configuration of the source drive to another one. The result is you can get two or more identical hard drives. Two of the most important reasons for mirroring a disk are:
- Prevent data loss on computer system.
- Avoid potential losses caused by disk failures.
Taking those factors into account, I’d like to discuss how to mirror boot drive on Windows 10. After you have done such work, you don’t need to worry when running into system errors (such as operating system not found). Even the primary hard drive fails, you can boot from the secondary drive to continue to use the computer.
What to Do before Mirroring a Hard Drive
You must confirm the following things before you start to mirror a boot drive on Windows 10.
- Making sure the size of the second drive is exactly the same as that of the boot drive you want to mirror.
- Figure out the boot mode of your computer: UEFI or Legacy BIOS (I’ll take the former as an example).
- Guarantee that the hibernation on the computer is disabled (by using exe /h off).
Now, please get ready to mirror existing drive.
Mirror Boot Drive for UEFI Partition
Before talking about Windows 10 mirror drive, I’d like to show you how to identify the type of your system.
Actually, it’s easy to identify the type of the system you own: a Legacy or UEFI based system. Obviously, MBR partition style is used in a Legacy system, while the GPT partition style is used in a UEFI system.
Figure out the Partition Style
- Find This PC icon on the desktop and right click on it.
- Choose Manage from the right-click menu.
- Select Disk Management under Storage.
- Right click on the Disk 0.
- Select Properties from the pop-up menu.
- Shift to the Volumes tab from General.
- Take a look at the Partition style part.
- Click on the OK button to close the window.
GUID Partition Table (GPT) means you have a UEFI based system, while Master Partition Record (MBR) means you have a legacy based system.
How to Mirror Hard Drives on Windows 10
Step 1: find the secondary disk that meets the following requirements.
- Make sure the size of the secondary disk is no less than the Disk 0 (at least the C drive of Disk 0).
- Make sure the partition style of the secondary disk is the same as Disk 0 (both are GUID Partition Table).
You need to initialize the secondary hard drive to GPT if it has not been set up yet.
Step 2:
- Mirror the Recovery Partition (check the TYPE ID and the size of the partition of Disk 0 and copy content of Disk 0 to the secondary disk).
- Mirror the EFI System Partition (check the size of System & Reserved Partition of Disk 0, create the System & Reserved partition on Disk 1, and copy file in this partition from Disk 0 to Disk 1).
- Mirror the OS Partition on Windows 10 (convert Disk 0 to dynamic disk, choose both Disk 0 and Disk 1, Add Mirror to C drive/volume on Disk 0, choose the space you want to allocate which is equal to the size of the C drive, and follow the wizard until the end).
How to fix when DiskPart has encountered an error:
