Fighting Irish Forums

I feel like Dr Frankenstein - my monster lives!!!

Now need to venture into BIOS land and get everything set up. Anyone have any views on setting up RAID - I have two drives and want one to mirror the other which I think is RAID=1, but not sure if this is the best approach as I know there are other things one can do?

Never used RAID myself but my understanding is that with 2 drives you can either have two copies of all your data to protect you from a drive failure (RAID 1) or you can split your data over two drives (RAID 0). RAID 0 is faster than RAID 1 but you lose everything if one drive has problems.

Correcto Mundo! Moe!

Depends on your preference for saving data...

Raid 0 will "stripe" your drives. Much faster, but any data corruption on one drive directly affect the same program on the other drive. Loss of a drive is not something to look forward to.

Raid "1" will mirror the first drive's data, providing a backup of the original.


Not sure if you could add a third drive outside the "0" array, to provide backup in the event of a failure.

OK, next issue!

Been into BIOS and set up the RAID array, boot sequence etc. Created a floppy disk for the RAID drivers. So far so good.

Only problem now is that I cannot get XP to install? I put the DVD in the drive, switch on the machine and in goes through POST OK but instead of the XP install starting I just get the following message

"DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

Even if I re-insert the XP DVD I just get the same message. Anyone got an idea as to what this might mean? I am thinking it might be the boot sequence in BIOS, or something to do with how I have wired up the DVD drive?

Thanks

Nellip

Could be both.

Depending on your Bios you can press a key (show while boot - F12 maybe) to enter the boot media menu.

But you can set up the sequence in that Bios will try to load an OS or Boot media. ()CD/DVD, HDD, USB...)

Maybe it will check the HD in your case first instead of the HD
But you can switch the order in Bios.

If that's not working you have maybe setup your DVD wrong.
Check if theres a jumper on the back of your DVD drive and if the jumper is set to Master or Slave.

Right now I'm not sure to what it has to be set. Last time I did that was years ago.

But maybe you can find instructions on the web or another teammate is able to help you.

Marco

Thanks for the advice. DVD drive is set to master on the jumpers - it is the only IDE device (HDD's are SATA) so think that is right.

Only other thought is do I have a bad copy of XP on the DVD?

Neil

If you suspect DVD (it does happen) check PMs for ISO of sp2.