Got some new SATA drives. Unsure about RAID...

[Jayce]

I'm trying to figure something out. Right now I have two hard drives. A 200 gig master IDE drive for Win XP, and an 80 gig IDE slave drive for Linux. Everything works great.

My goal is so successfully set up a Raid 1 setup (mirroring) with a pair of identicle 250 gig 16 meg buffer 7200 RPM Serial ATA 300 drives, using a 30 gig partition for Win XP and the remaining 220-ish gig for Linux.

So, what should I install first? I thought since Win XP would be the smaller partition, it would be wiser to put Win XP first. So I tried that. Then for the life of me I couldn't get Win XP to connect to the internet. So I said **** with it and went to install Linux. But thinking about it now, I guess if I would make a 220 gig partition for Linux, then when I add Win XP it would kick it to the end of the hard drive to use the remaining 30 gigs. Right?

Anyway... I'm completely lost. I have Linux installed on the first SATA hard drive, but I have no idea what I'm doing with RAID. No idea how to set it up. No idea at all. I hear it's simple as **** so I'm hoping a few small tips are all I need.
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[luke87]

did you reinstall the drivers to the ethernet port when you reinstalled windows? I had that problemon my new build when i could not connect to hte internet.

 

[Jayce]

No, I wasn't sure what to do. I ended up installing Linux and deleting the Win XP partition that I had put on it. So right now, a fresh copy of Ubuntu is overtop of XP and that's all that's on the hard drive. I was planning on doing a fresh format and doing things in order and step by step once I got some feedback on what to do.

 

[Jayce]

I talked to my instructor for a few minutes today in my pc tech class. First of all, I don't know HOW I did it but my Windows copy is from a Dell computer that my parents have. He said he's surprised as **** that it even registered and worked right. He said to me don't bet on it happening again. He also told me that he wasn't aware that Serial drives "like" partitioning or not.

The more I thought about it the more in doubt I got about holding onto windows. I am a die hard Linux fan, but I just wanted windows for the sake of having it in case I would come across a program that would be "un-runable" in windows.

Also... I was flipping through my pc tech book and I came across something. I found a serial ata drive section taling about how to connect it, and the power connector jolted my memory for a second. When I built my computer, I decided to wire-tie the serial ata HDD connectors and stuff them behind the back panel of my case so they were completely out of the way, because I didn't have serial drives or need them at the time. So with them being out of the way, I forgot them. Here's the kicker... my serial drives also have a 4 pin regular psu connector on them, which I used when I attempted to install the operating systems (xp + ubuntu linux) on them.

Anyway, I hope I didn't create any damage. He explained to me the serial connector runs the drives smoother and more efficient without any "power jolting" as he called it. But when I go home tonight I'm going to do a fresh format and try this again.

THIS TIME AROUND, what should I do?

I have a CD key for XP... should I just try downloading it somewhere? If I get a hold of XP, should I install that as the first partition? Should I even bother with partitioning? Also the purpose of this is to set up a raid 1 mirror format. Does XP support that? Can I mirror a hard drive with a 30 gig XP partition + 220 gig Linux partition? I'm just lost and full of questions...


Simple yet unrelated question - Is there any way I can copy every single little thing from an IDE drive and copy it to a serial drive? Is that what you call ghosting? How is it done, if it's possible?