I am building a new PC from scratch and want to dual boot XP and Ubuntu. I have two 1TB drives. I was planning to run RAID 1, whereby one drive would mirror the other drive, and install XP, Ubuntu, and all data on the single drive. Now I’m thinking maybe I should reserve the 1TB drive for data and install two smaller drives, one to hold XP and one to hold Ubuntu and their respective programs. In this latter config, the OS and programs would not be mirrored. I’m new to dual booting and linux. I was hoping someone could give me some advice on the best way to configure everything.

Thanks in advance.

What I would recommend is that the /home & Documents partition sits on the RAID set no matter what. At least if you lo0se the OS, you won't loose everything. Most applications rely on config files, you could setup a local backup on the mirror-set and ensure than any config file gets there, either through manual interation or via a versionninc control system (subversion anyone?). While OTT at first glance, you can leverage the power of version control to maintain configuration [see 1 for a start on the idea].

What about 2 smaller hdd which you could mirror and do your dual boot on.
that wait you would have
mirror set1: dual boot of XP & Ubuntu
mirror set2: data

You then get the benefit of RAID for both OS & Data and hdd is cheap enough it should not be too costly.
windows is a PITA in general and i would only consider imaging as a good disaster recovery plan, however reinstalling Ubuntu is trivial enough and provided you have a locally accessible backup then recovering should be easy.

just food for thoughts

hth
Thierry

[1] http://shifteleven.com/articles/2007...guration-files

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