One of our older network servers does not have native hardware raid support and it receives fairly light use. So i figured doing a software raid solution would be fine. Before i set this up on the server I've been testing windows software raid 1 using a hacked version of xp pro on a bench computer (legit license, but hacked a bit to get the raid 1 option to show for testing). From what i can see through testing its performance is actually quite good, with little to no penalty for writes, and equivalent read speeds of a single drive and near no cpu utilization. And through testing i found it responds perfectly to a drive failure. But, however, i only have experience with raid 0. And i am at a loss on how to allow the system to function after the primary drive dies. Basically, when simulating a failure, restart, and i remove the primary drive from the picture, the secondary mirror volume will not boot. I made sure the drive was set to be booted from in the bios, but all i get is a blank screen. Is there something special i have to do to allow the secondary to be bootable in the event of failure of the primary?

The easiest thing to do would probably be to boot off a third drive, one which isn't otherwise used so is unlikely to fail.