Installing a new HD using WinXP

[Pestilence3]

I'm planning to buy a new HD soon. I already have a HD that is 20.5 gb. The thing is, how do I gonna set it up? I mean, the partition and all? Do I need to d/load a third-party program to do it or I can just use Fdisk.exe in dos ( I have Win98 + Winxp combo)?


Thanks in advance

[Badaro]

Depends... are you going to 1) replace your HD with the new one or 2) use this as a secondary disk.

For #1, you can use an old Win98 floppy, or you can boot with the WinXP CD and do this during the setup procedure.

For #2, you'll need to go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management after installing the new drive. There's a tool there called "Disk Management", that will allow you to partition and format the new drive.

[]s Badaro

[KillerShots]

For option # 2, take a look at "dynamic disks" in the help file...you may like the "disk striping" option :)

What that does is it takes your secondary AND primary disks and merges them, putting some parts of a file on one and some parts of a file on another. What does this mean? Well, while the head on one drive is moving to position itself over the correct track, the head on the other drive is reading the data it requires...and vice versa, giving an incredible burst of speed if configured correctly.

[Badaro]

Originally posted by KillerShots
For option # 2, take a look at "dynamic disks" in the help file...you may like the "disk striping" option :)

WinXP Pro supports Software RAID 0? I was pretty sure only the server versions supported it...

[]s Badaró

[KillerShots]

Originally posted by Badaro


WinXP Pro supports Software RAID 0? I was pretty sure only the server versions supported it...

[]s Badaró

XP server has not yet been released, I'm sure I saw this on XP Pro, in fact I'll be doing it tonight...if it doesn't work, I'll know real soon :)

[Esturk]

Originally posted by KillerShots
For option # 2, take a look at "dynamic disks" in the help file...you may like the "disk striping" option :)

What that does is it takes your secondary AND primary disks and merges them, putting some parts of a file on one and some parts of a file on another. What does this mean? Well, while the head on one drive is moving to position itself over the correct track, the head on the other drive is reading the data it requires...and vice versa, giving an incredible burst of speed if configured correctly.
So what happens if one drive fails? You lose all your data right?

[KillerShots]

Originally posted by Esturk17

So what happens if one drive fails? You lose all your data right?

Correct. If one disk fails, every bit of data on both disks is lost. The advantage here is the speed boost. If you want both, you need 4 times as many disks as you have hard drive space and a RAID-10 system. If you just want redundancy with minimal loss of space, you can use the Windows XP RAID-5 system, but it's slower.