Raid1 advice & partitions

[Michael Taylor]

I'm about to setup a new PC. I have two 250Gb HDD's and plan to set them up
in a mirrored configuration (raid1).
In the past, where i've only had a single drive, i've always partitioned it,
with the OS on the primary partition, then more partitions for installing
programs, swapfile, temporary files and finally user data (I like to keep
things organised - and it helps me with backup & recovery).

I've not setup a raid array before. My question is - as far as Windows XP
Pro is concerned, will it only see what looks like one HDD, and will I still
be able to partition the array using Partition Magic? Is there any point in
doing this under a raid1 scenario?

The raid support is provided on the motherboard which is a Giga-byte GA-K8N
Ultra-9 which has two onboard SATA raid controllers which can both do raid
0, 1 and 0+1, and one of them can do raid 5. The HDD's are both Samsung
Spinpoint P120 series SP2504C

Thanks for any advice
Mike

 

[Yves Leclerc]

RAID 1 setup will ned "seen" as one drive with "half" the total HDD
capacituy (2 x 250GB = 500 MB but RAID 1 = 250GB).

You need to setup the RAID definition before starting the XP install. Then,
you need to "add" the driver, with <F6>, during the install process.

As for Symantec's Partition Magic and RAID 1 support, unknown. I last used
version 8, which had problems with SATA drives.


Also, be aware that you may not be able to access the Recovery Console, or
the repair screen access, by boot the CD Rom. This is because of the SATA
drivers and the RAID drivers are not "built-in" to the XP install CD
normally.

 

[Michael Taylor]

Thanks for your Yves. I'm looking forward to have a go.
Regards
Mike