System Description: Two 80GB hard drives (each as master on IDE3 and 4 in RAID 0 array, one drive set as bootable), One 14GB HD (master on IDE2), Abit KX7-333R board, Windows XP Pro, Highpoint 372 drivers, clean install of WinXP, all drives are bare, 512 MB DDR3200 RAM, RAID 0 array successfully setup and recognized by XP, Situation: I want to set up the RAID 0 array as the primary boot /storage drive and use the 14GB drive as a scratch drive for misc storage/downloads. When installing XP Pro, I did the F6 thing and used 3rd party drivers. All okay so far. However, I got to the point where XP asked about drive formatting. I selected the small drive to format as NTFS. It did so. Then I thought XP would come back and ask me about formatting the RAID 0 array which I also planned to format as NTFS. But after the small drive was formatted, XP continued to install without asking me which drive I wanted the OS installed on or without formatting the RAID 0 array. In short, when all was done, XP was running on my 14GB DMA33 drive and not on the 160GB RAID 0 array as I had intended. I saw the I could format the array using disk manager, but that still leaves the OS on a drive where I don't want it. I have Norton Ghost if that would be useful. Or do I just reload the software and this time specify the RAID array as the one to format first? Thanks all!

You do of course understand the implications of installing your operating system on a RAID 0 don't you? Think about this for one minute....if one of the disks in your RAID 0 fails.......how the heck are you A) going to boot B) fix the problem There is a reason it's recommended you never install an OS to any RAID except RAID 1. Go do some reading on the subject online and you'll begin to understand what I'm talking about. If it were me and I really wanted redundancy on my OS partition I would create a 2 - 5 GB partition on two separate hard drives and I would install on the first one (C:) and then I would mirror that drive to the other. That way if one of your HD's crashes, you can recover. I would then use the rest of the space on both HD's to create a RAID 0 or 5 (depending on the # of disks available) There is NO redundancy on a RAID 0 so if any of the disks crash. it's bye bye data.

A quick search of "RAID" in Microsoft's knowledge base yielded the following: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q114779 Take note of the 8th point (and I quote) " Mirroring is the only Windows NT fault tolerant option available for use on boot and system partitions"

Mr. Curt, I don't think Dave have mentioned "fault tolerant" in his post. RAID 0 is all about "performance", not "fault tolerant", so it's not a problem to install system on a RAID 0 partition, he can put data in elsewhere. A system can be reinstall but data may not be recovered easily. (e.g. you can reinstall all the games easily but cannot get back the save games in a few hours!!) If one of the drive fail, the only way to fix the problem is replace to drive and of course, all data will be lost. But you will also lost all data if you are using a single drive and the drive fail, right? As I know you need a controller card (e.g. Adaptec 2400A) for ATA RAID 5, that is relatively expensive. And of course you can run RAID 5 in NT with the controller since it's managed by hardware. Mirroring is NOT the only option!! Mr. Dave F, I think you miss some information in the installation process of XP. THe installation does NOT provide a chance for you to format a drive that u are not planning to install XP on it. You can only do partition but not formatting in the installation process. However, you can always format or partition other drives after you installed and booted into XP. You can use ghost to do a partition to partition image (if you like to do partition in your logical RAID drive, do it first), that will cost less time than reinstall, that should work in most case. If it just can boot, do a reinstall, and do a format and partition on your small drive in XP (can use "Disk management" in Device manager") Hope this can help... Jon

combine raid0 1 and 0+1?

That requires 4 harddisk of same size and u can just use 50% of the total physical disk space!

Thanks foe the help. I have tape backup so I'm going with RAID 0 with a system partition and a few data partitions.