Using another Drive to OC.

[marcopolo]

I've been mucking around with various hardware on various OC settings for almost 2 years now. In that time a few BSOD's have caused corruptions of various sorts in critial windows files needing considerable repair work!

 

I've now got my system nice and stable with lots of stuff on my HD I really don't want to lose. I run the OS on a 2xIDE drives RAID-0 and a SATA for storage on SATA channel 1. I am thinking of setting up another windows xp HD on the SATA channel 2 just for messing around with and changing the BIOS to boot from my new (spare) drive. Is this a good idea? If anything died in the OS I just reformat and start again.

 

Another question: If I do not install the RAID drivers on windowns install on the new drive am I right in saying that the XP installation will not see my RAID array? Will it just see them as two separate unformatted disks?

 

Marco.

[Steven420]

From my Limited Knowledge youd be better off runnin a windows install for overclocking on an IDE drive if you can (only need 6-10g) and dont run anything else while Overclocking unless you have 2 sata drives you can set up raid on. also dont know if your board is like the Nforce3 boards but on my Lanparty 250gb you can't get past 230Mhz runnin sata ports 1 or 2. the oc lock doesnt work on those for some reason. also if you dont install the raid drivers on your windows xp install then windows should pick up the unformatted space on the drives as individual drives or it may pick up the partitions as individual drives. or both. but i thought id give ya some stuff to look into till someone more informed can come along and put in thier 2 cents. But thats the way i do it. I OC on my 40G IDE drive and run my system for gaming on my Sata drive. for some reason i can get higher clock with my ide drive. i cant afford a raid setup just yet so dont know much about that..

GL and Happy Clocking!

[kitfit1]

I do all my clocking pretty much as you envisage doing, but not quite. I've got 2 raptors in raid0 with o/s and game and progs on. Then a 250gig drive with all my data on. Rather than using another drive, i just use Acronis True Image. It sets up a small partition on my Data drive with everything that's on my raid array imaged to it. If during clocking i corrupt windows, i just image it back from the Acronis partition. It works, and takes 3 or 4 mins. Beats spending hours reinstalling XP, and it's cheaper than another harddrive.

[Guest Darien]

I do all my clocking pretty much as you envisage doing, but not quite. I've got 2 raptors in raid0 with o/s and game and progs on. Then a 250gig drive with all my data on. Rather than using another drive, i just use Acronis True Image. It sets up a small partition on my Data drive with everything that's on my raid array imaged to it. If during clocking i corrupt windows, i just image it back from the Acronis partition. It works, and takes 3 or 4 mins. Beats spending hours reinstalling XP, and it's cheaper than another harddrive.

 

Yeah.. you told me about arconis... I still need to get that...

 

however I had employed that same techinque with my LP B... and unfortunately my Data drive got corrupted too :eek: that bummed me out... that's why I like External HD back up for drive images :spam:

[Guest laydback]

You can setup an additional drive as a "hot spare".

 

Setting Up a Spare RAID Disk

You can designate a hard drive to be used as a spare drive for a RAID 1, RAID 0+1 or

RAID 5 array2. The spare drive can take over for a failed disk. MediaShield RAID

supports two types of spare drives:

• Free Disk

A free disk is a disk that is not part of any RAID array, but can be used by any available

RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array that requires a particular disk when one of its disks

crashes or becomes unusable. The process is automatic and doesn’t require any user

interaction.

For example, if you have a system with four hard disks where one disk is used to boot

the OS, two hard drives are set up in a mirrored array, and a fourth hard disk is set up

as a free disk, then if one of the mirrored array drives fails, the free disk will be

automatically assigned to the mirrored array to be used instead of the failed disk.

• Dedicated Disk

A dedicated free disk is a disk that is assigned to a RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array

and that disk is used by that array only when needed, for example during a system

crash where a RAID mirrored drive is broken. The dedicated disk can be used only by

the array that it is assigned to and not by any other array, unlike a free disk which can

be used by any available RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array.

Note: You must have at least two RAID arrays to use this feature.

2. Spare disks cannot be used for RAID0 or JBOD arrays.

[Guest laydback]

I was going to suggest a setting up a RAID hot spare, but I thought you were running RAID0 not 5

[kitfit1]

Yeah.. you told me about arconis... I still need to get that...

 

however I had employed that same techinque with my LP B... and unfortunately my Data drive got corrupted too :eek: that bummed me out... that's why I like External HD back up for drive images :spam:

 

:eek2: Don't tell me, you left you'r Data drive on while you were clocking Darien :eek2: You should know better than that.

[marcopolo]

So if I separate of a partion of say 10Gb on my 250Gb) data drive I will have 2 partitions on it, then install windows (or use TRUE image and back up my raid-o to the 250GB drive in the 2nd created partition).

 

On boot up in the BIOS, does the IDE/SATA device see this 1 drive as 2 separate hard drives, where I can elect to boot from it, or do I just select the 250Gb drive as the boot device and the PC figures out which partition to try and boot from?

 

Marco.

[Steven420]

you will get an Operating System Selection Screen just like a dual boot setup for windows xp/any other OS.