RAID cards

timbim_2

I've got a system build on the go, and have been trying to set up the RAID capabilities of my mobo, to use my two seagate 250GB's in RAID1. This didn't work at all, so scrapped the idea. I now have a dedicated RAID card on the way, but want to know if I can just install XP home to one of the disks and leave the other one out totally, then when the RAID card arrives, just plug the card into one of my PCI slots, plug both HDD's into the card, set the one with XP installed as a master and then just boot from there?

Now, if you followed the gist of what I said, will it work?

Thanks!

malc_b

By Raid1 you mean mirror (just to make sure we are on the same page). Yes that will work. You need to make really sure you get the right disk names when you do though. Raid normally shows disk id and number. Make a note of what your windows disk is. That wants to be the src (source) when you make the mirror and the new disk the destination. On my raid I have the option of offline copy or not. Not is best. Offline runs in DOS mode and takes forever. Online, boots the PC as normal and does the copy in background.

Assuming you are using mirror for security you might want to consider 4 disk raid and have a separate raid for "my documents". That way you can rebuild windows without affecting "my documents" or even use "my doucments" in a new PC in case or severe failure.

timbim_2

No, not nearly enough space or raid card ability to do that! Once the system is set up , and entire image onto another disk is the plan, then incremental backups of changing data to reconstruct in the future.

malc_b

Raid card will add pri/sec IDE so 4 drives (or 4 SATA). These will be in addition to motherboard IDE/SATA.

If you just want to clone a drive then you can get software to do that (free from drive makers web site usually).