Can I RAID1 & Dual Boot/XP?
I run a system configured with 2 120GB Seagate SATA
drives and these are setup in a bootable, RAID1 configuration on drive C. Another 160GB IDE drive also has WinXP-Home,, drive F, but I (generally) don't boot off this drive. I want two independently bootable drives with the OS, if possible.
1. Is this configuration safe or does the OS get 'confused' between the OS/boot components on the two drives? I have ran this way before, but I've had problems (which may be unrelated). I am little concerned that my WinXP-Home OS is on two separate drives as WinXP-Home generally doesn't support dual boot configurations. To create the dual-boot system, I disconnect the IDE drive (already has WinXP-Home) & install WinXP on my SATA-RAID1 drive & boot off RAID1
drive.
2. I have had problems recently, with NTFS.sys being corrupted on RAID1 array, which forced reformat of RAID1 drives. RAID1 redundancy didn't help as I had to format. MS Knowledgebase article suggests this could happen. So RAID1 has redundancy provided there is a physical drive failure, but not so well if the SW/OS fails? Comments?
Thx. Scott
Independently bootable drives
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I am not completely sure that I understood what you want. Lets see, you want to be able to boot from the RAID array where you install Xp, or from the other 160GB drive with XP home, right?? So you want to have the os boot choice at start up. If this is what you want to do, you can use a boot manager (or boot loader)
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Your comments are correct: I want to boot from the RAID1 drives, but I also want the option to boot from the 160GB drive. In past, I handled this by 1st installing XP on the 160GB drive; then disconnecting it from the IDE and thus WinXP doesn't "see" the 160GB drive. I then load XP onto the RAID1 array and later reconnect the 160GB drive. This seemingly worked OK & allowed me to have two independently bootable drives; but perhaps it isn't the right thing to do? I had several crashes and my NTFS system ended up being corrupt. THis leads me to question whether/not WinXP can exist on two drives independently without the aid of partition magic or something like that.
Thx.
Scott