Dual botting with raid

[Newport]

Ok I have 2 hard drives with a raid controller. Set for raid 0 stripping. I would like to dual boot this comp leaving the raid 0 on the 2 hard drives untouched. My question is if I add another hard drive for a total of 3. per se a 30 gig one, Can I put the second OS on that one? I would like to have Win98SE and XP Pro as the OS's on it. I have looked for information about this kind of set up but have found little on the set up. Or if this is not possible what would be a good way to set this comp up?

[Droppyale]

Welcome to TIMO...

I'm not sure I can help you, but here's a bump

[Newport]

Hey at least you replied thanks for that.

[no1_vern]

HI Newport,

Welcome to Techimo!

I just realized what you are asking, I thought you wanted to boot from the raid 0 array. Yes, the easiest way is to just add another hard drive and set it up as the primary master. You should be able to just format the hard drive, install and go.

From M$ dual-boot page( http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;306559 )

Specifying the Default Operating System for Startup:

If you have more than one operating system on your computer, you can set the operating system that you want to use as the default one for when you start your computer:
Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click System.
On the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery, click Settings.
Under System startup, in the Default operating system list, click the operating system that you want to start when you turn on or restart your computer.
Select the Display list of operating systems for check box, and then type the number of seconds for which you want the list displayed before the default operating system starts automatically.

To manually edit the boot options file, click Edit. Microsoft strongly recommends that you do not modify the boot options file (Boot.ini), because doing so may render your computer unusable.




You might consider changing this to RAID 1. RAID 0 will work. Of course remember if one of the drives fails you are in trouble. you get no data redundancy and thus, no protection from a hard drive failure. If one drive fails, the information written to the other drive becomes useless. Why? Because RAID 0 splits chunks of data across drives so it's like writing half of a piece of data to two drives. If one half is gone, the other half is useless. Half empty, half full, either way, half is gone, except you can't drink the glass because it's chemically no longer a liquid...hehe.

Mirroring (RAID 1) will drop a few % on the performance of a single drive, but you get data protection because it writes the exact same data to two different drives. If one fails, you still have a backup. To restore the RAID (type 1 in this example), you just add another identical drive and it will automatically mirror the data on the first drive.

Good luck!

[Newport]

Thanks for the info. I think I'll try keeping raid 0 but I will back up programs and files that I want to keep on CD's. I had s-ata adapters but my comp crashed hard with those. Damn it was fast when it worked though