Hard Drive formatting and other questions from the RAID newbie

MichaelD

Lifer
Jan 16, 2001
31,528
3
76
Good morning AT Forums,

Well, I'm about set to transfer my system from Case A to Case B. Last night, I went and got the second new HD to match the new one I purchased Monday. I got lucky; not only are they the exact same make/model, but the serial numbers are only about 100 apart! Same batch. :cool:

Onto my questions: The Maxtors come with a MaxBlast floppy. A really neat partition/format utility. It has worked flawlessly w/the three drives I've used it on. It lets you set your own partitions/sizes as well as choose FAT 16/32.

How the heck do you set up the array, as far as prepping the drives?

1. Do I use the MaxBlast disk and format them one at a time, going thru all the motions? The MaxBlast utility DOES ask you to insert your system boot disk. In my case, Win98SE. Do I use FAT32? I don't know if RAID works better with 16 or 32. Can U tell I'm new at this RAID thing? Do I do this for both my drives?

2. Do I need to do step one at all? Doesn't the RAID controller (HighPoint 370) go ahead and format the drives anyway when you create the array?

3. Also, I'm going to be using my current HD (with the OS and my entire life on it) in the new rig as a backup drive. I should just be able Ghost the old drive, to the RAID array, and then make the RAID array my boot drive correct? There shouldn't be any probs w/this, like corrupted registry, right?

4. Which IDE channel should I put the old HD on, and should it be master or slave? I have a CDR and a CDRW, each on their own IDE channel as master right now. How do I incorporate the old HD into this setup? Is it a bad idea, period to have a HD on the same IDE channel as a CDR/CDRW?

5. Wouldn't I be completely lost without these forums? Oh heck yeah! ;)

Thank you for your time. This new setup is gonna be awesome; when I finally get it up!