An odd RAID question

[Percy]

My motherboard, a Soyo KT400 has onboard RAID, which is cool. It supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1, which is also cool. I however only have 2 hard drives, so I can't setup 0+1 in a standard manner.

To make things more complicated, the system's a dual boot with WinXP Pro and Win2k Advanced Server (I'm studying for MCSA). So what I'd like to do is to use the mirroring capability of both of those OSs to create a software mirror, and thus (sort of) have both a stripe (hardware) and a mirror (software) using only two hard drives.

There are two problems that I'm facing. I've already installed both OSs and I'm going to have to change both drives to dynamic instead of basic. In the past when I've done this and had a dual boot system, I've lost the second OS. That's problem #1. In addition, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that I'll have to edit the boot.ini file to be able to mirror both OS's in a dual boot system.

So, any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[geoscomp]

Just a minor suggestion..why bother? The only reason for a raid 1 system is hard disk redundancy if one fails. If your raid 1 is a mirror on the same hard drive..there is no purpose to the raid.

[Percy]

Good point. But to answer your question, #1 to see if I can do it and #2 since I left about 25 GB open on the combined RAID drive, I'm wondering if I can use the mirroring function if one of the two partitions on the combined drive fails (I made a seperate partition for each OS as well as the extra drive space for mirroring). Thanks.

[geoscomp]

yeah..you can do it, but I can think of no situation that would cause a partition to fail that wouldnt also cause the raided partition to fail as well

[Gabriel]

Hi,
IMHO you can't do Software mirror of system partition (I remember this from goofy NT 4.0)


Cheers,
Gabriel

[kato2274]

Hi,
IMHO you can't do Software mirror of system partition (I remember this from goofy NT 4.0)


Cheers,
Gabriel

Gabriel is right, you can't have your system partition IE your OS be on a dynamic volume. you could do this idea with a data partition, but you can't do it with the OS As far as I know, unless something has changed with the windows and dynamic volumes in the last year that I missed.

[Percy]

Yoinks, sorry for not replying guys, been busy. Thanks for the helpful suggestions, I eventually changed the situation to only do the mirroring for a data partition on the drives (I reset everything up...yet again). Anywho, thanks for the insights.