Woofmeister
Golden Member
I've bought my components and am going to put together my new rig. I also bought an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate 32 bit. This will be my first Vista install and my first Raid O install. To make things more difficult for myself, since I'm not hearing great things about Vista at the moment, I want to have good old XP Professional available if I need it. That means I'm going to dual boot. I have three brand new hard disks--two 150 GB WD Raptor Xs which will be in a RAID 0 configuration for OS, drivers and programs and one 500 GB Seagate 7200.10 for data.
My plan is to set up my RAID in BIOS with a strip size of 128KB using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, then install Vista (obviously with the additional step of installing RAID drivers) on the RAID creating one large 130 GB partition for Vista, drivers and all applications and a second partition of whatever usable gigabytes I have remaining. I assume the second partition will be at least 15 GB. Following successful installation of Vista and all Vista drivers and updates on the 130 GB partition, I will go back and install XP Professional on the 15 GB partition on the Raptors and then install all my programs on the 130 GB partition and move all my data over to my 500 GB disk.
Does this sound like a viable plan? Am I forgetting anything? Would I be better off just installing XP on the 500 GB data drive rather than messing around with partitions? Should I wait to create my smaller partition until after my Vista install and use Vista's Disk Management console tool to create my XP partition? Have I made my XP partition too large? With only 150 GB for all my applications, I don't want to waste any gigs.
Advice would be most appreciated.
My plan is to set up my RAID in BIOS with a strip size of 128KB using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, then install Vista (obviously with the additional step of installing RAID drivers) on the RAID creating one large 130 GB partition for Vista, drivers and all applications and a second partition of whatever usable gigabytes I have remaining. I assume the second partition will be at least 15 GB. Following successful installation of Vista and all Vista drivers and updates on the 130 GB partition, I will go back and install XP Professional on the 15 GB partition on the Raptors and then install all my programs on the 130 GB partition and move all my data over to my 500 GB disk.
Does this sound like a viable plan? Am I forgetting anything? Would I be better off just installing XP on the 500 GB data drive rather than messing around with partitions? Should I wait to create my smaller partition until after my Vista install and use Vista's Disk Management console tool to create my XP partition? Have I made my XP partition too large? With only 150 GB for all my applications, I don't want to waste any gigs.
Advice would be most appreciated.
