RAID-1 Redundancy for OPERATING SYSTEM?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RoboEngineer
  • Start date Start date
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RoboEngineer

I wonder if you can attach 2 Hard Drives to either an
ATA100 or ATA133 bus of the motherboard, and get Windows
2000 SERVER to view these two drives as a BOOTABLE RAID-1
Volume. This basically would be the C: Drive with all
Win2K System files on it, in a Mirrored config so if I
lose 1 drive, I could replace it and not have to start
from scratch on the operating system. If this is known to
be either possible or impossible, please let me know.
 
RoboEngineer said:
I wonder if you can attach 2 Hard Drives to either an
ATA100 or ATA133 bus of the motherboard, and get Windows
2000 SERVER to view these two drives as a BOOTABLE RAID-1
Volume. This basically would be the C: Drive with all
Win2K System files on it, in a Mirrored config so if I
lose 1 drive, I could replace it and not have to start
from scratch on the operating system. If this is known to
be either possible or impossible, please let me know.
Click to expand...

Easily done with an add-in PCI IDE RAID card. High Point makes a nice one,
as does Promise.
 
RoboEngineer said:
I wonder if you can attach 2 Hard Drives to either an
ATA100 or ATA133 bus of the motherboard, and get Windows
2000 SERVER to view these two drives as a BOOTABLE RAID-1
Volume. This basically would be the C: Drive with all
Win2K System files on it, in a Mirrored config so if I
lose 1 drive, I could replace it and not have to start
from scratch on the operating system. If this is known to
be either possible or impossible, please let me know.
Click to expand...

Oh, and I should have mentioned that it is NOT possible to have the O/S on a
software RAID.
 
RoboEngineer said:
I wonder if you can attach 2 Hard Drives to either an
ATA100 or ATA133 bus of the motherboard, and get Windows
2000 SERVER to view these two drives as a BOOTABLE RAID-1
Volume. This basically would be the C: Drive with all
Win2K System files on it, in a Mirrored config so if I
lose 1 drive, I could replace it and not have to start
from scratch on the operating system. If this is known to
be either possible or impossible, please let me know.
Click to expand...

Your motherboard has to be capable of RAID or you need to buy an add on card
for the RAID. The raid can be made bootable by making it the first boot
device in the bios (usually these raids are labeled SCSI by the raid
firmware, so SCSI should be the first boot device).

Also when you install the OS from the CD (or floppy) you will have to press
F6 at the right time to install drivers for the raid. This message at the
bottom of the screen comes on early in the install process, and stays on for
only about 2 seconds, so it is easy to miss.
 
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