--
Bob in Florida


"Dave Patrick" wrote:

Partition Magic or any equal will do. Since the mirror is built and handled
at the hardware level it is invisible to the operating system and these
utilities. BTW there is no advantage to installing software to a partition
separate from the operating system.

It's been many years since I used PM, so decided to try Acronis because it's
available at work - bad choice, perhaps. Does PM require CD or floppy boot,
or does it do all under XP?
The array configuration looks a little strange to me - When I goe to XP Disk
Management, the OS (boot?) partition and the SW partition show up as a
logical drives, and the other two are "primary". Some of the menu choices
are grayed out on the OS and SW, too.
Are there any disadvantages to separate partitions? (except, of course for
the extra complexity). My original intent was to limit the OS partition size
while allowing lots of space for SW installs to expand while still allowing
for easy OS format and reinstall if required.
I keep hoping that MS will enable that a clean OS reinstall will not
necessitate reinstall of all software. On the other hand, it appears that XP
(for me, at least) is solid enough that this may now be an academic issue.
It certainly wasn't so for 98, nor for my son-in-law, who got so fed up with
XP that he's now in the Apple camp.
--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

"Bob J." wrote:
| Hi,
| I built a new system about a year ago, including a legit copy of XP pro
and
| well-equipped ASUS A8V MB. To complete the upgrade, I built a hardware
IDE
| RAID 1 with 2 160G Maxtor HDDs using the promise FastTrak controller and
| firmware.
| Now for my mistake - I partitioned this drive to allow for easy reinstall
of
| the OS, into 4 parts - OS, Installables, SW, and Data at 8, 50, 13, and 79
| GB, respectively.
| In spite of my best efforts to keep all SW installations on the SW drive,
Im
| now at 98% occupancy of the OS drive and must repartition it. I can find
no
| written information on what software to buy and/or what to do to make this
| process have more than a 20% likelyhood of completing successfully without
| data loss. I've tried XP internal features and Acronis Partition Expert
to
| no avail. I tried breaking the mirror by removing power from one drive of
| the pair, but no boot.
| Is anybody out there a real RAID expert for a configuration like this???
| --
| Bob in Florida