thinking about raid but have some questions

tonyzero · 26 May 2007 at 16:31

Hi,

i have a Asus T2 which runs 24/7 to update my website and i have already had to replace the hard drive about 2 months ago so now i want to prevent having to reinstall all software again so i bought a second hard drive which is exactly the same, now what i want to know is what do i need to do to make the drives work together so if one fails i will still have a backup or can still use the PC

can i just plug in the second drive and mirror it or can you only do that before you install windows ?

any help would be grateful

rpstewart · 26 May 2007 at 20:02

I don't think that machine supports RAID so your only option would be to use mirrored dynamic disks within Windows. Now that has the advantage that you can mirror an existing partition without the need to reinstall however it does have a fairly major disadvantage - if the primary drive fails you need to manually edit the boot.ini file to allow the system to boot from the other drive.

tonyzero · 26 May 2007 at 21:30

rpstewart said:
I don't think that machine supports RAID so your only option would be to use mirrored dynamic disks within Windows. Now that has the advantage that you can mirror an existing partition without the need to reinstall however it does have a fairly major disadvantage - if the primary drive fails you need to manually edit the boot.ini file to allow the system to boot from the other drive.

i have just looked at the downloads section on the asus web site and there is a driver for raid "SiS 180/182 RAID Controller V5.1.1039.2020 WHQL" so dose this mead i can do raid ?

rpstewart · 27 May 2007 at 11:24

It's difficult to say for sure without knowing exactly which board is in your machine but if your board has one of those controllers on it then you should be able to create a RAID array using it.

Phil2008 · 27 May 2007 at 13:37

rpstewart said:
I don't think that machine supports RAID so your only option would be to use mirrored dynamic disks within Windows. Now that has the advantage that you can mirror an existing partition without the need to reinstall however it does have a fairly major disadvantage - if the primary drive fails you need to manually edit the boot.ini file to allow the system to boot from the other drive.

All you need todo is put xp on your backup drive, then if xp goes wrong on you main drive, boot xp up from the backup drive and restore xp back to your main hdd