Striped drives as C: drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter TC2
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T

TC2

Can I just put three identical IDE ATA100 drives in my system, boot from an
XP Pro install CD, and somehow convince it to use the three as a striped
drive? So I just have a drive C: and everything is on it, but it's striped?
Supposedly this motherboard supports striping, though I' unclear whether
that's even necessary with XP managing the striping.

If not, what's the next best thing? Get XP running on one drive and then do
this stuff of making it dynamic and telling Windows to make a striped drive
out of three disks? How then do you get it to make good use of it since by
then you already have Windows installed on a single drive?

Thanks
Tom

Posted to hardware and performance
 
TC2 said:
Can I just put three identical IDE ATA100 drives in my system, boot from an
XP Pro install CD, and somehow convince it to use the three as a striped
drive? So I just have a drive C: and everything is on it, but it's striped?
Supposedly this motherboard supports striping, though I' unclear whether
that's even necessary with XP managing the striping.

If not, what's the next best thing? Get XP running on one drive and then do
this stuff of making it dynamic and telling Windows to make a striped drive
out of three disks? How then do you get it to make good use of it since by
then you already have Windows installed on a single drive?

Thanks
Tom

Posted to hardware and performance
Click to expand...

You need to have a raid controller and have it set up before you install XP.
How you do that depends on the motherboard or controller that you're using.
Then when you install the OS will see your 3 drives as one.

I'm assuming you're doing this for increased speed. I suggest that you keep
your data on another drive, or that you do backups often. If one of your
three striped drives goes bad, you'll lose all the data.
 
Thanks for the info.

If my motherboard IDE controller can do that then I should see some option
for that in CMOS? Or how before I install an OS do I get it to treat these
drives as one?

If my motherboard won't do this, can XP treat, say, a 2nd partion on drive
1, and drives 2 & 3 as one striped drive so I at least have a fast data
area?

Tom
 
what mobo do you have? usually the ones that have raid support 2 drives for
raid. you must look at your mobo manual! I have to set a jumper on the mobo
AND enable it in the bios.
Then, when installing XP from CD, you must push f6 when it asks if you have
you have other drivers to install. Then when it tells you to, you must
insert a floppy that has your raid drivers on it. then you will be directed
to continue with the xp install.
 
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