Hello all! i need to know how to figure out how to install BeOS on my 4 maxtor 90845D4's (7.9GB) with a promise fasttrak 33 raid controller in raid 0. the controller post sais everything is fine on raid 0 . i went to bebits to get the raid boot disk but that is only if the setup cannot see the drives. but it can. it can see all 4! but how can I make it install as one single partition on 'ALL FOUR DRIVES???' . all ive got to is that in the setup partitions i cant find out how to make all the seperate drives as one like when i had it in win98 .i have done this with win98se and it was a nightmare [ie finding special proprietary boot disc that can format raid, win98 boot disc cannot]. i want to use the 'setup partitions' option in the Be setup if it is possible, and use a BeOS partition. the win98 setup kept crashing and the psu i was using wasnt powerfull enough to hold the drives (the kept on turning on and off) now i have a nice superflower and it works great. so, how can i do this? thanks ps dont bother emailing me, i can only reply once BeOS is running! (i do my email on it! )

I hate to say this but, only a fool installs an operating system on RAID 0. Perhaps you're unaware of this but, RAID 0 offers no redundancy. If you did install your OS onto a RAID 0 and one of the drives failed, not only would you not be able to boot, you would lose all data on the entire RAID (no redundancy). I know a lot of people seem to think you gain some performance on a RAID 0 but let me tell you straight up, you don't gain anything noticable to the human eye so it just isn't worth the risk. Just about the only thing a RAID 0 is any good for is putting your pagefile on. In industry only a RAID 1 is used for operating systems because it offers redundancy.

The following: "I know a lot of people seem to think you gain some performance on a RAID 0..." should say: "I know a lot of people seem to think you gain some performance advantage on a RAID 0...:

... and i didnt care about redundancy... these are very good maxtors and i would bet that they could go another 5 years. i noticed that if you have slower hdd 33mb/s but the access time and reads go soo much faster! now how can i get raid 0 to work on my beos please!

It's not worth the trouble....and whether you think they'll last forever or not, one never knows when a hard drive is going to stop working. You set up a RAID through the RAID controller.

i did exactly that, chose stiping , every one is on line and functional on the cards' post! if i didnt set it up it just would say 'no array defined' but the problem is in the beos set up i dont know how to format them as one drive, as i can only install to one of the four!