Sata Raid 0 and Dual Boot OS

Azza

I've been hearing its impossible currently to have both Linux and Windows running together in a dual boot enviroment on software raid 0.

Anyone know if thats true?

By the way Maxheadroom if your reading this I finally got those CDs you sent me today. Thanks again.

slartibardfast

no not impossible, just a lot of extra work prepairing intrid modules,
and the added bonus of using Alpha quality software to read & write to
your disks in linux. Way to risky for me, but if your up for it check out this software:
http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid

P.S. What raid controller have you got?

leeroybrown

I know nothing about Software RAID 0 on Windows (sounds scary enough without reading up), but if whatever windows software RAID scheme you can use works by RAID'ing partitions (as Linux S/W RAID does) then it should be possible.

Read up on the likelyhood whatever performance gains you hope to make before trying this as RAID0 is really only a gain if you need intensive I/O for video editing scratch space or something like that. Otherwise all you're doing is giving up over 50% reliability for a small gain in boot/loading times.

The only issue with that scheme that I can think of is getting the two booting seamlessly using one boot loader.

slartibardfast

sorry I assumed the poster was talking about his bios/driver *software* raid controllers, opposed to windows software raid seen as it is impossible to boot off windows software stripe sets.

dmraid has no support for nvidia bios *software* raid at the moment,
Azza does your MSI board has a second SATA controller? if so use that with dmraid...

Edit: You'll still need somewhere to load the kernel & initrd from, e.g. your /boot simply can't be on the RAID0, then the initrd kicks in and assembles the raid allowing / to be mounted. An old 100mb disk or a CF card would do the trick

flamegrill

Stop evening thinking about this. It will only hurt your mind in new and interesting ways.

Fenster

flamegrill wrote:

Stop evening thinking about this. It will only hurt your mind in new and interesting ways.

I find that learning anything new in Linux generally does that anyways, so what the hey!

Azza

Oh to hell with with it I just buy another hard drive. Anyone know where I could get a good cheap 10-20Gig 7,200rpm drive?

Fenster

Lidl or Aldi? I know they do the odd bit of PC hardware for half-nothing.

slartibardfast

Wise decision, <20gb are getting rare these days,

How about this 40gb 7200 maxtor for €45 on jes? Meets the cheap critia!
http://www.jes-computer.de/product_info.php?pID=12990

leeroybrown

slartibardfast wrote:

Edit: You'll still need somewhere to load the kernel & initrd from, e.g. your /boot simply can't be on the RAID0, then the initrd kicks in and assembles the raid allowing / to be mounted. An old 100mb disk or a CF card would do the trick

Actually /boot can. So long as your the RAID0 has a persistant superblock and you supply boot paramaters to the kernel. It can also be done without a persistent superblock by giving a bit more info. Setting up redundancy for the MBR can be troublesome but is not impossible and there are How-To's.

md=0,/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1

Linux Software RAID is actually very reliable but I wouldn't touch RAID 0 in hardware or software unless it was required for speed.

ShevY

i'll think i have a spare 2gig hdd if you want it

slartibardfast

Does md work with *bios* software raid?
Christ I'd be afaid linux+bios-raid would nuke the raid-magic, mind you when you think about it how many ways is there to stripe a disk

I've always used linux's raid software, keeping windows on a nasty old ibm disk :-p

Edit: Fixed crazy sentance order :eek:

Azza

Maybe I will get one of those new Maxtor 300G drives with the 16MB cache for it. Seems only fair to do it justice.