Any Software for Mirroring Drives in XP Pro?

Since XP wont let you mirror drives once they are already setup (even dynamic)
does anyone have any suggestions for a software based RAID 0/1 ???

Something that will do the registry and system files would be great!

Any suggestions are appreciated!

Thx

Scott

 

??? XP-pro allows for RAID 0 striped arrays as an option you can configure from Disk Manager. That's the only native RAID available but it should be easy enough to set up if you have two drives with some unpartitioned space on them and the disks converted to dymanic.

 

Thx for the reply...

I did try that, but it only seems to work if you are installing XP from fresh. I have 2 120Gig drives. One has the main system on it and the other is blank. I converted them to dynamic and when I select the blank drive to mirror, it doesnt show me any drive to mirror to (system drive) (or vice versa). I have also seen the info message that this wont work if the system was upgraded from a earlier operating system (win2k)...

Scott

 

Scott - I'm going from what I read here since I've never tried this myself but my understanding is that you need to start with some unpartitioned space on both the drives and set up the RAID-0 in that space. If your master drive is all partitioned, I don't think XP can handle it.

Do you have any software that can squeeze the master drive's partition(s) a little to free up some space?

 

Thats the exact problem.... On the C: Drive (they are both 120Gig's) I have about 100Gig Used... Even if I squeezed it down I would still would be only be able to mirror the remaining 20gig partition to a second drive... Thats why I am looking for 3rd party software, as I dont want to reformat...

Thx

Scott

 

In the first post you said, "Something that will do the registry and system files would be great! "

If that means you want to mirror the system stuff and not your data (good idea) then you pretty much need to have a system partition and one or more data partitions. Is that the way your existing hard drive is set up now?

 

Unfort. both system and data are on the same partition.... I dont know if Hardware Raid is the only option, but I have had horrible luck with Raid Cards and the miserable device drivers... I do want to mirror everything..

scott

 

Software RAID should be OK with XP-pro. Slower by a little than hardware solutions but part of the OS and does well.

At this point I'm going to suggest something you probably don't want to hear.

Burn your data to some sort of backup media. It's a lot since with 100Gb of stuff on the drive, probably 85-90Gb is your data but I don't see any other really good option.

Format the drives and set up a mirrored system partition of maybe 15-20Gb. That's generous but will certainly allow for installing apps there and keeping a decent page file and never having to think about space. You then have several hundred Gb of storage to partition for your data files.

Any other option would still require you to back up the data since all would put you at some risk of losing the drive contents.

Now for the 'don't mirror' suggestion. Unless you have some great need for being able to very quickly get running again in the event of a major catastrophe to the OS, do the same data backup but just reformat the master drive with your OS partition and use an image burning app like Ghost to make a copy. Then use the rest of the master drive and all of the 2nd drive for data storage. Faster system, 15-20Gb additional storage, and you can rebuild a blown system in less than an hour to exactly as it was before you crashed by restoring the Ghost image to the system partition.

We run hardware RAID on our high-availability servers because we can't live with even an hours down time to rebuild. Hardware version with mirrored OS partition and RAID-5 data partitions but it's a business requirement. For most other types of computers, I just don't see it as the most reasonable option.

 

Hi Scott,

I wouldn't even consider using RAID 0 (striping) on a home system. Been there, done that, and I lost everything when I had a hard drive malfunction. My computer was delivered set up that way, and I didn't have the knowledge, at the time, to convert to RAID 1 (mirroring), which is the way you seem to be leaning.

At present, I'm not even using a RAID setup (mostly good for bragging rights, anyway). I agree with Newt that partitioning, and frequent backups (I use Drive Image 7 to back up to the second hard drive), are the way to go.

 

Newt/Jim,

I agree multiple partitions are the way to go, I need higher availability. I have used Drive Image (Ghost etc) for years and need something that can provide a more up to the minute redundancy. Mirroring is really what I need so if a drive goes I can just boot to the new drive... There must be some third party software to do this??

I am a old Novell groupie and this was old school for that type of OS...

???

Scott