4 replies to this topic

[Biggles]

Hi guys , venturing into uncharted waters here , and Roco is getting out of his depth ,
and ask Biggles to find out the facts ,

Having just lost a 2 nd hard drive with 10 years of stored stuff
( all was not lost I had some on DVD's )

I have just purchased 2 identical Western H/Drives , sata 3 ,

I am thinking in running them in Raid 1 ( mirrored config )
been merrily googling away  I now think I understand the process

but I got 2 questions I ain't sure on ,

can both drives have partitions in raid 1, at the moment ,I got a "C" drive ( the O/s )
a "D" drive and a back up store on "E"  all on the one hard disk ,
the second h/drive ( now defunct  ) had partitions (3)  for photo's , letters,  and a partition
encoded for bank stuff etc ,

I guess the question is,  can I partition both drives , and run raid 1,
what gets mirrored , all the partitions I make on each hard drive , or is it not possible to partition and use
raid1,

the second part is can I add another hard drive ( the third )  and keep it separate from the 2 raid disks

I guess it's a weird way of setting up a home computer . , but heck it matches Roco's brain ,
if there is a easy way and a hard way ,Roco enjoys a challenge ,

[dlewis23]

I can't see why you couldn't create the partitons on a RAID 1 but If something were to happen I don't know if it would maybe cause a problem when it comes to restoring data.

Every time I have done any kind of RAID Ive always kept it as one and had the OS/C Drive on a separate drive.

Can't hurt to try. Just create the RAID 1 first then and partition it using Disk Manager.

[Biggles]

Thanks for the info ,
I shall be removing my primary h/d , and installing the 2 new h/d's , and doing a clean install ,
so nothing to loose I guess apart from  time ,  I will give it a try anyway later this week ,

[Biggles]

just to give this a wrap,

I did the Raid 1 mirrored , maybe running Xp Pro wasn't the best O/S to use ,it needed additional raid drivers,
via a floppy drive  ,

But after 2 attempts I got there  , did the 3 partitions on each of the 2 hard dives ,
loaded up Xp . it got mirrored on the 2nd drive ,at that point I thought yes .
so I loaded up some dummy files . made a XP pro built in ASR ,

gave the automated system recovery  try , it worked but it took hours and removed all partitions  on both drives  including  files
apart from the 1st on both drives .

now back on 2 drives , with the o/s on "C"  , with the right click "send to" to include the 2nd hard drive,
and a better back up scheme in place.Including a external e-sata drive ,

and BTW , a stack writeable DVD's , the first in the uk  came out at about $3.50 USD a disk  , I  just bought some Sony writeable
DVD disks at $0.30 USD,

[mudmanc4]

I'm surprised that the ASR utility actually wiped partitions.