Safely adding a 3rd (non-RAID) boot drive to a RAID rig

[DeepSparklePupa]

Hi,

I've got a nice rig running two 20gb Western Digital drives in a RAID 0 array on a Promise FastTraK 100TK2. Alas, I've filled 35gb of them already, and I am prepared to install a new 80gb WD drive to create more space. While I am at it, I thought I'd upgrade from W2K to XP. Thus, my dilema: How best do I install the OS on the new disk without putting the data on the RAID array at risk?

My initial thinking is to simply disconnect the RAID card, install the new drive, boot from the XP disk, install the OS, reconnect the RAID card and pray to God that I can still see all the data. That oughta work, right? ;-)

-DSP

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

There should be an option to install your operating system on the WD. Just tell it to install to the 80gig. It'll go through and format it for ya, then install.

This way, you can Dual boot both Win 2K, and Win XP.

But, not having a RAID array myself, I can't really confirm this.

 

[vailr]

Just be sure to use the exact same raid driver (currently in use for Win2k) as you use for accessing the raided disks under WinXP.
Maybe save a copy of the raid drivers to a floppy disk.
What you could do, is: first copy any backup file copies to the new 80 GB drive (with boot order set as 2nd, AFTER the raid drives), while booted under Win2k.
Then power off, disconnect the 2 raid drives.
Go into bios setup, change boot order to the 80 GB drive as primary.
Install WinXP (with only the 80 GB drive connected) and the raid controller drivers.
Power off, re-connect the two 20 GB raided drives to the raid controller, and reboot again, with all 3 drives connected.
Remember also that NTFS versions are slightly different between Win2k & WinXP. Not certain
whether Win2k can "see" an NTFS-formatted drive, formatted with the WinXP version of NTFS.
So, might be best to format the 80 Gb drive using the Win2k boot CD.

 

[MDE]

That should work. Just leave the old OS and data alone and you can always go back to your old config.