Omfg! I'm Screwed!

[ClayMeow]

Okay, WTF?! I used to love winxp pro....but now I find out, the hard way, that winxp pro (and win2k pro) do not support MIRRORED arrays?!

 

see: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documen...kb_cnc_klvo.asp

 

WTF is up with that?! Why would the professional version, which is supposed to be better than the home version (or vanilla version in 2k) not support something home supports?! How many casual users (the ones that'd use home) would implement mirroring?! Don't they think business professionals would want to backup their drives?!

 

Well anyways, if you saw my previous posts you'd know i was taking a mirrored array from one computer into another (the second one having winxp). Well I thought it worked smoothly until I tested stuff out. Then I realized that the "second" drive of the array was there separately but I didn't know that because I had mounted some drives that took it's drive letter. IDIOTIC!

 

Anyways, so I unmounted the network drives and went into the bios to enable the raid and went back into windows. When I saw the "foreign" crap listed next to it, that's when I ran the google search and got the aforementioned link. So now, I dunno if I ruined anything by trying to import, because one of them is "recognized" and "healthy" but wants to be formatted (which i can't do because I'll lose my data...if it's still there), and the second one is just coming up as foreign and I can't do anything with it.

 

If I lost all this data, I'm so screwed. In addition, it seems I'll now have to reformat this computer and install win2k (non-pro) or winxp home, which I don't think we have copies of. I spent days installing all the programs and crap and setting everything up....now I'm gonna have to do it all over again!

 

kill me

[Psychotic_god]

Whoa, that sucks .... I hope some people learn a little something from this thread before trying/planning to install their own mirrored array on theirs.

[ClayMeow]

fyi, it seems that I was wrong. WinXP Home doesn't support mirrored arrays either!!!! WTF?! How can this be. I'm heard people talk about mirroring here before, is there a way around this?! No way a bunch of you are using win2k (vanilla)!

 

I dunno, I think maybe I'll reconnect it in its former computer...hope that the data's still there. back it up...then just NOT use mirroring, and just schedule daily backups like I do for the servers here. grrrrr

[Gremlin]

Have you converted the discs to Dynamic??

[habitual geek]

i have a really simple program that will rewrite the boot sector and make any partition anything you want, worked flawlessly for me when i goofed up once when re-installing xp pro

 

during the initial windows setup screen i accidentally deleted the wrong partition, went ahead and installed xp on the correct one, assumed all data was gone on the other, but this little utility took 5 seconds to put it back the way it was originally, volume label and everything!

 

if you need it let me know, i can send it to you tonight

[ClayMeow]

Have you converted the discs to Dynamic??

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that doesn't make a difference. everything i've found online indicated that it doesn't support mirroring

 

habitual geek, thanks, I'll let you know. I'm eating lunch now, but afterwards, should hopefully have a chance to throw them back into the old computer and see if the data's still there or not.

[Kash]

That's weird, cuz I've definitely seen people with mirrored arrays running XP Pro. If you can stripe, you can definitely mirror. Though with RAID arrays, it's rather difficult to transfer between systems and the only sure-fire way it'll work is if you install a fresh copy of Windows in the new rig.

 

Oh yea, now I remember. My roommate from last year setup RAID 0+1 on his rig. Worked just dandy

[Cookieman123]

Good 'ol Windows.

Though Vista Ultimate Edition will be pretty darn sweet.

[Some_Guy_]

I think those of us who are running mirrored arrays set up the mirror in the RAID BIOS instead of in Windows. In that case, Windows just sees one physical drive

[Gremlin]

When you choose to convert dynamic drives, you can create striped/mirrored disks. So I have no idea what you are trying to do.

[Ste]

I think those of us who are running mirrored arrays set up the mirror in the RAID BIOS instead of in Windows.  In that case, Windows just sees one physical drive

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Ya, I don't think windows has anything to do with it, doesn't it operate through BIOS like Some_Guy said?

 

Clay meow: I think what you read ment was that the OS does not support it. Doesn't mean you can't do it, just have to have BIOS do it.

[ClayMeow]

yeah, you're probably right. but that means I can't take it from one computer to another then . At least not with the bios options of this mobo. It'll let me create a new array, but it won't recognize the "current" one.