Installing Vista on a raid system

[dario03]

Hey guys I'm trying to tri-boot XP, Vista, Ubuntu on a raided computer and so far I have XP installed. Problem is Vista only sees my 300gb raided partition as a 149gb unspecified drive. I'm guessing I need a Vista x64 PATA raid driver for my Asus A8N-E motherboard which is a Nforce4 chipset. Is there such a driver and where can I get it?

And I'll probably need a driver for Ubuntu also so anyone want to tell me where I could get that.

 

[eyeCpc]

The Vista installer will only see half of two drives since one clones the other for the most part. The Asus support site would be the place to look if the board cd's own driver set doesn't see reults for the 64bit version.

But why RAID with 3 OSs? With each seen as a separate logical drive you can far more easily resize the XP primary if needed in order to create the one needed for Vista as well as the VFat extended for Linux. The second drive can then serve as a storage and backup drive for both versions of Windows as well as things like driver sets needed in ubuntu in different folders.

 

[dario03]

I wanted the speed of raid. I'm doing striping to get the extra speed. I had a third hdd for storage. From what I've seen raid with pata isn't possible at this time though

 

[eyeCpc]

You'll never see performance with any RAID or sata array. That's not how it goes with that type of setup. RAID or sata arrays are best seen in networking and not for home builders. If you want speed go with a WD Raptor for the 10,000rpm on seen those drives. One glitch or file lost means all fall down on any array.

For the new build here I pondered on seeing two 750gb drives in for an array and backed right off. That allow the current second 500gb sata now used for storage to be split for multibooting OSs. An array is also limited to one type of partition mirrored on both drives. It would be NTFS or VFat not both.

 

[saltynay]

It does give a noticeable increase in performance and practicality and a raid0 setup of 2x320gb seagate barracuda's is only 1mb/sec slower then a single raptor, and costs less and you get more gb.Can you please tell me wait raid level you are talking about here???? sounds like raid 1 but then you want and increase in performance which is raid 5 or raid0.

 

[eyeCpc]

That's not the word I hear from IT professionals that work with Linux and 64bit as well as the server editions. I get told you lose one file and you can easily lose an entire array and you don't see any gain. Capacty is running two drives as two separate logical drives not seeing fragments spread over two drives appearing as one.

 

[Ronnie]

raid 0 increases speed by a little
but yes there is that risk of losing two hdd worth of data if you mess something up but thats the chance you take with the speed increase

 

[dario03]

Its raid 0. I've never had a hdd failure and was only going to keep programs and unimportant or backed up data on the raided drives. So I wasn't to concerned with the array failing. From what I could find on the net though, it seems no one makes a pata raid driver for Vista.

 

[eyeCpc]

Have you tried the drivers on the board's software cd? Vista does offer some support for some older driver sets.

 

[dario03]

Yeah, they didn't work. I read somewhere that there are no vista pata raid drivers though.