Raid 1 and Roco

[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.