OS on Raptor and Raid 1 storage

[dubblebubble]

Hi all,
I am about to replace a dead hard drive that took out nearly 100gb worth of music and pictures. To do this I was thinking that I would buy 2 320gb drives for storage and 1 36gb raptor to put the (windows XP) OS on. I would like to set the 2 large drives up as raid 1 to ensure data integrity. Is this configuration possible on an nvidia force4 motherboard? if not what is the best way to configure these 3 drives for best data reliability.
thanks

Paul

 

[Hawkeye22]

Yes, it's possible. I have this setup on my rig.

 

[dubblebubble]

Thanks Hawkeye, any tips? I have instructions on setting raid (the motherboard manual) up on the two hard drives, but how does windows know (or does it need to know) that the two drives are in raid configuration?

 

[Hawkeye22]

My setup is a little different but procedures should be similar. I have my OS/boot drive set up as a raid 1 with my scratch drive running non-raided all off the NVRaid controller.

You will need to enable NVRaid in the bios. If your individual SATA ports also have raid mode, enable 2 of the ports for your raid 1 (raid mode). In you case, you can make SATA 1 non raid and SATA 2 & 3 raid. I'd then install the raptor on SATA port 1. At this point you may not want to install the 320g drives yet. This will ensure the OS gets set up on the proper drive.

During the XP install, you will come to a screen that has the option to install additional drivers using the F6 key (SCSI and such). You will need the RAID floppy that came with your mobo or download the drivers from NVidia's web site and create the floppy. After the drivers are installed, continue as normal. Once you have XP working, attach the 320g drives. On bootup, press F10 or whatever the key stroke to enter the raid bios is. Follow the mobo instructions on creating a raid array and adding the 2 320g drives to the array. Afer this is done, you can boot into windows. Go into the disk management console and you should see the new drive with unallocated space. You can partiton and format the drive from here. (XP should only see 2 drives since the raid drive will appear as one 640g drive to the OS)

It should be pretty simple. Just be sure to read your mobo manual on how to setup raid first.

 

[dubblebubble]

Beautiful, thanks Hawkeye.