[lucky_luc]

I seem to have a penchant for making things complicated. Here's what i'm trying to do:

Use my external HD with 3 partitions. 1) storage space. 2) Windows XP to boot from. 3) a RAID mirror.



I'm rather determined, but it's really hard to collect all of the various pieces of information from all over the net, especially when those tips seem to conflict with each other.

I have a MacBook Pro 10.4.11 (intel, of course). 92GB HD.
I have an external HD (LACIE) that i use FW800 with, though it is FW400 and USB capable.
I have a windows laptop available to me if i need it for anything (it seems i'll need it to install XP on the external HD).
I have access to a friend's Leopard Mac (which has bootcamp, of course, which could be very helpful).

Do i need to do the partitions using the XP laptop or with Leopard in order to format the drive correctly?
Do i partition first, or set up RAID first?

If you have links to articles or anything that you know works, please give me those links including any of your own tips.

Thanks ahead to anyone who helps!

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XP cannot be installed on external hard drives.
Even if you install on an internal drive and stick that in an enclosure, it will blue-screen at you.

The other question is, why would you want RAID on an external drive?

[Neil Jones]

XP cannot be installed on external hard drives.
Even if you install on an internal drive and stick that in an enclosure, it will blue-screen at you.

The other question is, why would you want RAID on an external drive?

[lucky_luc]

Rats, i didn't have this set up to notify me of your response. Sorry for the delay.

I've come across a lot of articles on how to install XP to a USB drive. Even from a Mac (http://www.xlr8yourm...706.html#S20998). There a few ways to approach it, and all of them may require some experimentation, but it seems remotely possible. If i end up finding out (the hard way) that i can't get it to work, i'll do an internal installation. But for that i need to make sure i know how to make the XP OS save everything to an external, since i barely have room on my internal HD as it is (if anyone has tips or articles on how to do that please let me know).

That lack of room is why i want to put XP and a RAID mirror on the external. Why would i want to limit myself to 45 GB mirrored internally? If the drive dies, i wouldn't be able to recover either of them as easily as i would with to separate drives.

_________

Anyway, here's the current status:

I have formatted my external drive into the 3 partitions i talked about. OSX's Disk Utility can format a DOS format, for which it uses FAT. You just have to change the "options" to "master boot record" to enable that. So i have a 20 GB FAT partition as well as my storage partition and RAID partition (which i have not yet set up in an array).

I've continued to do research and am currently planning on using a leopard macbook (just in case having bootcamp available becomes helpful) to just directly install XP to that external partition. I understand that if i boot the macbook with the XP disc in it while holding "C" i will be able to start the installation and select which drive i want (this stuff i've mostly found out from articles on installing XP to a USB drive). If that doesn't work i might either make a .iso of the leopard mac on the storage partition of my external drive, as it seems that bootcamp will only partition/install on local drives, so if i'm booting from an external with partitions, i hope that it'll recognize the other partitions. That, or i can try doing the installation simply with the internal HD of the macbook removed (which i understand is really easy with the new ones).

I know it's a lot, but are there any thoughts on any of this? Thanks!

[lucky_luc]

Long story since my last post, but for anyone who wants to do this, go here:

http://guides.macrum..._External_Drive