3drives => 1 RAID drive

[PattiMichelle]

I'm getting a new motherboard for more CPU's but also because it supports RAID1. I've lost hard drives over the years, and having a simple RAID mirror would be great, so if there's a crash of a hard drive, I just replace it. I'm looking at an ASUS board and I'm wondering how to proceed. I have OpenSuSE 10.2, 10.3, 11.1 and WinXP all installed, and in addition I have three physical drives
sda 500MB SATA
sdb 250MB SATA
sdc 250MB SATA
... I'd like to combine these all to a single 1TB drive, but I'm not sure how openSuSE would react to this. I know fstab and boot.ini would have to be modified. I have a vague idea that I might move all partitions to a RAID partition somehow and then change fstab and boot.ini. I'd appreciate any input from a wizard-ish person.

Maybe after doing this, I could add a blank drive to the system, then use software (?) to create a RAID1 mirror out of the system+newdrive pair? Not sure what software would do this.

Also, there's the whole question of software/BIOS RAID. I know OpenSuSE has gotten very good at recognizing when BIOS RAID is enabled, but I don't know how to make the transition without freshly installing everything. In the past, I'd used Clonezilla or G4L to copy partitions to a new (bigger) drive, but I think in this case I would have to ghost it to a preexisting RAID1 drive set: does anyone know of any such software that will recognize a RAID1 partition for cloning purposes?

Thanks!
Patti