I have an Nvidia hardware RAID 1 array and need to reformat. But I don't have any spare storage media, so I need to get along with the 2 disks in the array. I figured I'd do as follows:

1. Delete the array, so I have 2 separate but identical disks, A and B, with my files
2. Put disk B aside
3. Reformat disk A, build RAID 1 array with it, install Windows XP
4. Put disk B back in
5. Boot to Windows on disk A, copy my files from disk B to disk A
6. Add disk B to the RAID 1 array, rebuild array

And now I'd have a new RAID 1 array, fresh install and all my files intact (the ones I copied). Here are the parts I'm unsure about:

• Can I build a RAID 1 array using just one disk, then add the other one later?
• Can Windows on disk A see disk B and allow me to copy my files over?