Reverting from Windows 7 to Windows XP Pro (With SPANNED HARD DISKS)...

[DemonTraitor]

Hi

I have a Windows 7 (EVALUATION) PC, which is going to expire and wish to revert back to XP Pro for the time being...

I have configured 2 x 500gb Hard Disks in COMPUTER MANAGEMENT as SPANNED to make 1 x 1TB Disk, what will happen to this SPANNING when I revert to XP Pro?

Will I lose the SPANNED CONFIGURATION?
Can I just RE-SPAN in XP and everything will be ok?
Will I have to BACKUP all the DATA?

What to do.....???

Regards

Demon

 

[SiriusB]

I have found conflicting information with regards to spanned volumes. Some of the MS technet pages say the information for the spanned drives is held on the HDD, so would suggest it sticks around if you install a new Windows OS. However, I also saw mention of a CD/floppy you should create to facilitate the recovery.

Generally speaking, I have always been under the impression that any kind of RAID/spanning done via software [i.e. Windows] is pretty much going to be toast if you reinstall.

All of this is irrelevant really as you should be backing up anyway!

 

[DemonTraitor]

I connected the hard disks to my own PC, and the BIOS recognized just the one HD, and the OS (W7 Pro) did show any disks at all.

Looks like I may need to get a single 1TB HD to move stuff to.

No Backups... the Server holds all my DVD collection, but took a long time to rip, will have to do it all again as last resort

 

[Fanatic]

You need to import foreign disks in disk management maybe? Though you can't do that without having Win7 installed already.