So a couple of months ago, the company I work for was interested in using a domain controller at a fairly large and important event that we conduct yearly. The idea was that rather than having to do last minute changes on about 120 laptops to accommodate various groups or needs, we could just push out any changes needed via group policy and save oodles of time. To keep things nice and mobile, we decided that a ThinkPad T61 would make an awfully nice mobile domain controller. We even threw in a second SATA drive into a removable tray so that we could have RAID-1 on our mobile DC. And that is when we hit the first snag.

Apparently, Microsoft deems it dangerous to be able to create dynamic disks and/or RAID arrays on laptops due to the “removable” nature of the media. In all fairness, I don’t really blame them – who in their right mind would set up a RAID array using a removable drive on a laptop? Well, that’s exactly what we needed to do. » Read more: Dynamic Disks on a Laptop