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Raid problems


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#1
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I know that if you want to start a new OS in raid that you need to have the drivers ready when you hit F6. What I was trying to do is raid my existing hard drive already loaded with windows and mirror it to another hard drive "same size, same partitions and formatted" . I'm using a Asus board and have raid turned on in the bios and followed all the instructions to a tee. When I press F7 to save and reboot I get "Boot disk failure" because it does not reconize my drives under raid.

I was told in a article I read that using raid to mirror two drive was possible even with xp loaded on one of the drives. Can I load the raid drivers in the drive with windows to help it see the drives made under raid.. I tried this several times and it won't work.

Someone else told me this won't work but there are several articles out that say it will.

AllI want to do is do raid 1 and mirror my drive loaded with XP to the empty drive and let them work together. Has anyone tried this before. Thanks for the help. Picky
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#2
Neil Jones

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I know that if you want to start a new OS in raid that you need to have the drivers ready when you hit F6. What I was trying to do is raid my existing hard drive already loaded with windows and mirror it to another hard drive "same size, same partitions and formatted" .


It's possible to clone it to the RAID setup but Windows will not boot because it'll be looking for the previous method of starting up - ie without RAID.
The only way you'll get this working is to clone to the new setup and do a Windows Repair on it from an XP CD, feeding it a driver from a floppy by pressing F6 when prompted.

The ultimate question is why do you want to use RAID in the first place?
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#3
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I want to use raid 1 to be able to have a hard drive take over when one fails. I thought that raid 1 mirroring would be a good solution. I do have a backup system; I use Acronis to save an image every night to an external hard drive and SyncbackSE to backup my backup to another external drive. Give me you honest opinion of what you think of raid1 and how you back up. I see lots of computers every week that people say I wish I would have saved my pictures , now it is to late or too costly. Thanks Picky
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#4
Neil Jones

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I want to use raid 1 to be able to have a hard drive take over when one fails. I thought that raid 1 mirroring would be a good solution. I do have a backup system; I use Acronis to save an image every night to an external hard drive and SyncbackSE to backup my backup to another external drive. Give me you honest opinion of what you think of raid1 and how you back up. I see lots of computers every week that people say I wish I would have saved my pictures , now it is to late or too costly. Thanks Picky


You already have a good back-up system going (which is more than most people do because they don't even have any form of backup whatsoever), cloning to an external drive is far better than using a RAID setup for the simple fact that if (touch wood) your computer is stolen, you still have the data in your possession which you won't have in a RAID setup.

The other potential of course is a failure of the RAID controller on the board at some point in the future. You can pretty much guarantee you'll never get the same board again and you cannot guarantee that a new board has the same RAID controller vendor or revision. When it comes to setting RAID up on a new system it'll pretty much ignore what's already there and wipe it anyway.

Realistically by the time you've mucked around setting RAID up again after replacing the one drive that's failed, it's often just as quick to replace the stand-alone drive that's failed (in a non-RAID setup) and image your backup back to that. Hard drives on their own are generally reliable, most now come with three or more year manufacturer warranty anyway so if it fails in that period of time, send it back. The average stated lifespan of a hard drive is 50k hours which, if in use 24/7, is 5.7 years, though of course you'll probably find it won't last 5.7 years, it may last longer, it may be dead out of the box.

For home use RAID is overkill and cost wise, too expensive. Business wise and for servers it has enormous benefits for companies who need the server working every hour of the working day, but for home use, you don't need it. Your external drive (which itself is backed up) is more then sufficient for what you need.
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#5
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Thanks, that makes allot of since. I will continue with my backup system. I use Acronis and do an incremental back up after a full backup and have to start over at times because of the amount of incremental backup files that I pick up. So every once and while I will delete all my backup images and start over again ' As long as my system is stable". I also keep my first Image after a clean install and all my programs loaded so If I have to I can be back in business in one hour. Thanks For your time. Picky
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