dual boot with winxp x64 on a RAID 1 setup
 

I have experience with Linux before, but I'm not sure what steps I would need to do for setting up a dual boot with linux on my Windows XP Pro x64 machine with my SATA RAID 1 configuration. Can someone offer some tips on how I should approach this?

I can try and help but I must first tell you that I am no expert on Linux whatsoever.

I have successfully setup a RAID 1 on my Linux only box; granted there was no dual boot involved but try this, if it doesn't work you aint any worse off from when you started.

When installing Linux, you will need to setup your partitions using DiskDruid. Set them up as you usually would, but set them up as RAID partitions a rather than EXT3. I'm sure I had my swap partition the same as usual however. Once you have setup your partitions you will need to tell the installation which partitions are going to be linked by RAID and what level you want it set at, i..e 0,1 and so on. The root partition needs to be RAID1 as far as I can remember but if you are wanting them all as RAID1 this wont be a problem.

So, take for example three partition (for sake of easy peasyness)

PARTITIONPARTIT....PARTITION TYPE........SIZE

SWAP...............SWAP...................512MB
/(ROOT)............RAID1..................3GB
/(ROOT)............RAID1..................3GB
/HOME..............RAID1..................20GB
/HOME..............RAID1..................20GB

This is, of course, presuming you have a 46.5 GB hard disk. The two / partitions and the two /HOME partitions need to be linked together but as I managed to do this with the nice and easy DiskDruid it really shouldn't be too hard to get going. Try it, if it works great, if not, my bad, get some expert advice!

Good Luck

Thanks for the reply! I found gparted (NTFS linux based resize livecd) and am contmplating trying that out, just uncertain if I'm going to go through with this cause I have my Windows set up the way I want it. I have no problems doing this on my laptop (running FC5 quite well right now) but of course there is no RAID setup there :).

Well if you are worried about your Windows install just create another partition that you will put Linux on. Keep your Windows partition the way it is setup, make sure you allwo youself more than enough room for all you Microsoft exploits though, going over the partition size in a multi partition setup can, not always, result in problems. Then, once the other partition is created, set that up for Linux however you wish. Windows should be fine, Linux should be fine and we can all be happy!