Planning on setting up a new computer and have opted for Gigabyte's GA-81495P Pro mobo with Intels Pentium D 820 dual processor. This mobo has Gigabytes Xpress Recovery2 option to restore the system. Among the requirements of this function are that a primary partition must be reserved. It is only capable of backing up and restoring the first physical hard disk with Windows OS. My setup will have a 250 GB SATA-II HDD as HDD1 with XP Pro on one NTFS partition and my programs on another NTFS partition. HDD2 IDE contains my Data files in FAT32 and HDD3 IDE is where I plan to install SUSUE-64 10.0 with ReiserFS. So the question is: it safe to use Xpress Recovery2 to restore files in XP with this type of a setup ? I would expect it to at least mess up the MBR/GRUB. If this setup was configured as RAID5 would that be a better option and forget about the Xpress Recovery scenario ? Thnx 4 any feedback.

until u get better advice here some comments are:

fat32 for shared between MS and Linux is the way to go

grub can be easily restored to mbr with a live cd such as kanotix or knoppix.

raid gets messy when your drives are not the same as you lose the extra bit.
raid 5 normally is like a raid mirror for 2 drives but with 3 as altho I am sure to start a flame I am not in favour of trying to mix linux with MS with raid.

(2) some questions comments on backup....restore....do you have a dvd burner or cd burner....or a tape to archive or external drive to backup?

if so I suggest the gigabyte recovery is redundant.

alternatives in MS to it would be ghost images...or paragon images. But mixing the image with an attempt to raid...well I would not try it my brain hurts heh heh.

Linux as a free (GPL) imaging found at www.partimage.org but the last I checked it does not handle xp but can handle fat32 ok.....then there is the linux disk dump with compression command dd

here is a good read if you have the time

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506