With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Mandriva Free 2007 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This guide shows how to remove a failed hard drive from a Linux RAID1 array (software RAID), and how to add a new hard disk to the RAID1 array without losing data.