Somehow at work, I managed to let myself assist in the management of the hardware at Hyro. Hooray for me.
The last guy was a windows only man. When a computer died the other day, and chckdsk /f didn’t work he was out of options. I come in with a linux cd and hey presto, some data is readable (It seems that it is a nasty disk).
He is an artist, and I know his plight. He needs the speed of a local disk, but probably should back it up somehow. Things change that often that keeping tabs on backups is a pain.
So I thought, haha, give the man two disks and see if Windows will do a software raid. Both disks are probably crap, but at least they shouldn’t fail at the same time.
Spent most of this morning googling. Came across this interesting forum:
short-media forum
It was a kind of yes / no thing. The only way I was going to get an answer was to actually do it.
Fired up VMWare, worked out how to add a second disk, shrunk the first partition with some linux tools and loaded up disk management. I was able to create a striped volume, not much else.
Maybe it was because I was running without any service pack. Fired that on and tried again, still no luck.
I remember reading that it may not be possible with a disk that holds the operating system: a limitation of the software perhaps, so I bung in a third disk and give it another go, carefully reading all of the screens again.
[hmmm, seems I no longer have a copy of the image that was here]
Here is the magical screen where 5 = 3.
I don’t mind sticking up for Microsoft sometimes, but it’s this sort of thing that makes it hard.
Just about to try the hack over here, but I think sleep might get the better of me.
Funny how sometimes you can go months without posting, and then two big things come across your lap.
-= Comments
1. Clinton | July 21st, 2006 at 2:44 pm
When i realised i couldn’t (easily) do software RAID (2-disk mirror) on a non-server addition of XP, I purchase an Apatec SATA RAID (1210SA) card ~$80 AUD and it’s been really good. Yeah - i know it feels crazy to buy hardware when the software should be able to just *do* this (stupid policy for this feature I feel)… but using a hardware solutions has actually been a good result.
It was also pretty easy to plug-in the existing hdd (with XP pro installed) into the card etc. and not lose anything (i had backed up everything as that was a real concern Second disk got mirrored up and apart from some extra heat from two drives me checking on the disk health (SMART hidden from the direct interface now) I’m happy.
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