Soft RAID on WinXP Pro?

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: dclive
That's not correct, nweaver.

You can break the mirror and then you'll be able to boot the single drive, true - I was thinking of RAID0/5 when I said that.

As long as the HAL hasn't changed and you put the right disk drives *prior to* moving from one motherboard to another, you'll be fine.

With Windows mirroring, maybe.

With a RAID1 set up by a controller (onboard or not)... hit or miss. Sometimes they have some extra data stored on there with array information (usually at the beginning of the drive) that prevents Windows from properly recognizing the partition(s). I would NOT count on being able to take a single disk out of a RAID1 and just being able to use it like that as a standalone hard disk. If you put it on the same controller (or, usually, a controller in the same family), you'll usually be OK.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: dclive
That's not correct, nweaver.

You can break the mirror and then you'll be able to boot the single drive, true - I was thinking of RAID0/5 when I said that.

As long as the HAL hasn't changed and you put the right disk drives *prior to* moving from one motherboard to another, you'll be fine.

With Windows mirroring, maybe.

With a RAID1 set up by a controller (onboard or not)... hit or miss. Sometimes they have some extra data stored on there with array information (usually at the beginning of the drive) that prevents Windows from properly recognizing the partition(s). I would NOT count on being able to take a single disk out of a RAID1 and just being able to use it like that as a standalone hard disk. If you put it on the same controller (or, usually, a controller in the same family), you'll usually be OK.

That's frightening, and goes against the very nature of hardware-based RAID. That's not good. How common is that?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: dclive
That's frightening, and goes against the very nature of hardware-based RAID. That's not good. How common is that?

Pretty common, from my understanding, but maybe this has changed.

This is not specific to 'hardware' RAID, either -- it just depends on whether the controller stores some metadata on the drives, and how it is stored. Usually they do store some data about the array (since it makes it MUCH easier to transfer it to another controller if that is what goes bad -- for instance, arrays on most Promise controllers work even if you swap the drive order while powered off). Sometimes they store it in a separate partition (using some of the space on the drive), and the 'main' partition is exactly what Windows expects to see (so in that case, you could just take one drive, put it in another computer, and read the data out). But not all controllers do that.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: YoYoBabyYo
Thanks OdiN. I converted both drives to dynamic disk, but mirror was still grayed out. I googled for an answer, but it seemed that other people had the same problem and were told that WinXP did not support mirror, but stripe and span.
I do not have a RAID card right now, but I am shopping for one that does hardware RAID 1, and all I really need is two ports.

Do not use motherboard-integrated RAID. Around upgrade-time it becomes very, very difficult to ... upgrade ... once you've done that, without buying another RAID card.

Surely you can just break the mirror, move the drive over and recreate the mirror?

maybe, if they happen to be the same chipset, otherwise you are SOL.

I'd forgotten about that.

 

[John]

Update: How to enable software RAID in non server version of W2K/WXP

http://www.meedio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=48309