MS Windows after Slack 11 plus RAID 1
 

Hi there,

I would like to install Window Media Center 2005 on a machine with two identical hard drives and Slackware 11.0 installed on one of them. The two hard discs have the same partitions and file systems on them. There's also a SuSE Linux on one of the discs.

The computer boots using Grub and chainloads LILO when I choose Slackware in the boot menu. LILO is installed in root, Grub is in the MBR.

Now, here's my question:

What do I have to watch out for, when I want to
- make combine the two hard discs to a RAID 1 system
- install MS Windows Media Center
and in which order would you recommend me to create a RAID system and install MS Win?
BTW, do you happen to know if MS Windows Media Center supports RAID 1, at all?

What's the best strategy for this?

Thanks in advance!

gargamel

You're trying to do something that requires a little planning on your part. First of all, since you want your raid to work in both windows and linux the very best and simplest option for setting it up is to do hardware raid. Newegg has a wide selection of PCI cards that do the trick and work well with linux. I would set up the array first and then install the operating systems, but that's purely a matter of preferance, since you can just mirror one drive (hopefully the one you installed the OSes on) onto the other when you set up the array.

Be sure to watch out for file system compatability stuff. Windows tends not to work with most of the file systems that Slackware will default to and it takes some work to make linux play well with ntfs. Search the forums if you're curious.

Ok, thanks. I thought I should be careful...
I'll consider hardware raid, now, but my original idea was just to mirror the system disc onto the other one, thus smoothly introducing raid to an already well-behaving system... avoiding a complete re-install or reformatting. There are already identical partitions with corresponding file systems on the two discs.

My original idea was to backup disc one to disc two, but I found that I don't... In other words, the main reason for me thinking of raid is laziness... ;-)

gargamel