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On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:08:55 +0000 Paul Sutton <zen14920@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi I have been asked by someone how to mirror a harddisk onto another so the system sees it as one hard disk, I am unsure what he means as I thought the mirror command in dos simply made a copy of 1 harddisk (or partition)0 onto another. I think he may mean RAID, where he can take C: and D: so windows 98 sees both as one drive. I know this is not exactly a Linux question, but am I right in interpreting this as raid, and how would he implement this under 98, I am sure you need a RAID card, and possible scsi harddisks. I know Linux supports RAID. I am a little out of my depth with this, but think I have an idea what he wants, Thanks for any help Paul
RAID comes in two varieties: hardware and software. As far as I am aware, only the NT series of Windows OSs support software raid, unless you're using some oddball system that is loaded *before* Windows. Since you're talking about Windows 98, the easiest solution (although potentially not the cheapest) would be a hardware RAID setup. Basically, Windows would be none the wiser, so a 2x40Gb mirror-RAID would appear as a single 40Gb disk. You wouldn't necessarily need to go for a SCSI system as there are plenty of ATA RAID controller cards available. You would, however, need Windows drivers for the controller, and you would certainly need the controller to be of the bootable-variety. If the controller is non-bootable then you'd need a system on one of the non-RAIDed controllers to actually boot. Things can get a little squiffy if you're going to do that. The other thing is: how "computer literate" (God, I hate that term) is this person? Are they requesting an actual mirror (for redundancy purposes) or are they simply asking for a complete backup of the current "C drive"? Do they realise that a simple mirror will not actually give them any more space? They'd need a striped set for that. Grant. -- Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.