You did not mention the OS you wanted to use. Shall I presume XP? If so, you would need to configure the RAID array first. XP will not have the RAID or SATA drivers. You would need to install these and get them configured in XP. You could then copy the entire partition to the RAID array. The fun part comes when you first boot from it. XP will see the hardware change and probably not start. You will need to do a repair installation and reactivate the OS. You can back data to another drive. The fun part comes if one of the RAID drives fails because with RAID 0, you lose it all when this happens. You would need to do one of two things after replacing the bad drive. You would need to either have an image of the RAID array or do a clean installation (which will require providing RAID and SATA drivers during the installation. An image of the RAID array could be copied back directly. You would store that image on the backup drive. How I would do it would be to configure the RAID array and do a clean installation at the start. Again, you need the RAID and SATA drivers to do this. Once completed, you can attach the other drive and copy the required data to the RAID array and then just reformat the old drive and use it as a backup if it's large enough. After the clean install is complete, I'd make an image to be stored on the other drive in case of a system failure. It's a lengthy process and much of how you do it depends on how important it is to save what you have. Good luck.