Win xp/2000 dual boot?

[nick25]

Hi, on my next computer that I'll be building up shortly I will be having 2 74GB raptors in raid0 (I think it's 0, ) is it easy to set up a raid array? Also I want to have a dual boot of windows xp and windows 2000, preferably a different OS on each drive. Are there any good online guides showing you what to do? Is it complicated? Never done this before.

Thanks, Nick.

 

[Barkerd]

BIOS.

Firstly you have tell your BIOS that you want to use RAID rather than standard IDE/SATA. On my ASUS this is in the IDE configuration section but will vary depending on mobo.

RAID Utility

Having told the BIOS you will be using RAID you should be able to access the RAID configuration utility during boot up when you see your disk configuration displayed on screen. For my machine I think it is Control+I to enter the Intel RAID setup. Check your motherboard manual for the hotkey to do this. Once in the utility create an array probably RAID 0 with 128K stripe is the norm.

OS Install

Now you have your empty RAID array you can install the OS. For XP you boot from the install CD and wait for it to offer an F6 option on the bottom of the blue screen normally in the first few seconds. Hit F6 quick otherwise you will miss it and XP will find no disks. A couple of seconds after hitting F6 you will be promted to load the RAID drivers that came with the mobo from a floppy disk. Asus give you the drivers on a CD and a utility to create the driver floppy but you will need another PC to do this. ABIT just give you a driver disk which is easier. Once you have installed the RAID driver, XP should install as normal.

For a dual boot install you will probably need to install Windows 2000 first and follow the instructions in the following link. Windows 2000 should have an F6 install driver option during the first part of the install too, similar to the XP install.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/2000xp.mspx

Good luck ...

 

[nick25]

Thanks for the reply mate. I'll update the thread when I come round to havng to do it.