Setting Up a Spanned Volume

[ejames]

I have Vista home premium installed on my Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600 laptop. I
have two 80GB hard drives with C:\ setup as a RAID drive.

After installing Vista the two drives show up as C:\ and E:\ whereas in XP
Service Pack 3 they showed up as one spanned volume C:\ totalling 160GB. This
is the way I want it to show up in Vista. My question then is how do I
achieve this? My second hard drive was empty so I reformatted drive E:\
thinking that I would be given the option to create a spanned volume, but it
is greyed out . . . When I open my Toshiba RAID console, it shows two hard
drives but Drive C:\ or Disk 0 is listed as RAID whereas drive E:\ or Disk 1
is listed as "JBOD (Not RAID)".

I'm at a loss as to how to fix this and was also wondering if it is best to
just leave it as it is. What are the advantages/disadvantages of setting up
one RAID spanned drive?

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can give!

 

[DL]

If you set up a stripe array, you will have to do this from scratch, ie a
new installation.
If one hd fails in the array you will lose all files ie everything on the
drives.

You have to set up the array via the raid bios consol.
For a stripe array, you then install your o/s and programms.

 

[jamesph]

I agree with DL however I also think you will need to create a raid driver
which is probably on your motherboard support cd (possibly under <make
JMicron JMB36X 32/64-bit RAID Driver> burn it to a floppy or usb device and
install it during the vista setup when prompted...also you might need to back
up all your data because setting up the raid on the two disks I believe will
wipe the disks..ready for a clean install

 

[jamesph]

--
jph

 

[DL]

Vista should have native support for the raid drivers
Only a stripe array will wipe all, a mirror wont - provided you create the
mirror using the corect hd to build from

 

[ejames]

That is the problem that I was expecting and hoping to avoid; that is if one
hard drive fails I will lose all files.

That is not good . . .

Think I'll keep them the way they are for now . . ,

 

[ejames]

I don't want to set up a mirrored RAID volume.

Thanks though!