RAID 1: Dual boot Fedora 9 & XP

[Sam Varshavchik]

Sebastian Gurovich writes:

> « HTML content follows »
> Is it possible to setup a RAID1 for a new installation of an XP/Fedora9 
> dual boot system with two new hard-disks: (Seagate 500 GiB 32 Meg buffer)
> 
> I want to safeguard both the XP and Fedora partitions by having one disk 
> mirror the other.
> Are there any good Fedora 9 guides to follow for this?

Nope. How exactly do you expect Fedora to implement RAID 1 for Windows XP?

> I haven't yet purchased the motherboard but I could go for one with a RAID 
> controller so I could also use so-called FAKE RAID. But would I need 1 or 
> 2 controllers and which controllers are open source? 
> I'm really confused about using RAID1 with dual boot and so any help would 
> be much appreciated.

You are confusing three completely different things.

Hardware RAID is where the RAID function is implemented by a dedicated RAID 
disk controller. Some hardware RAID solutions are operating 
system-independent. As far as an OS is concerned, Windows or Linux, they see 
one virtual disk, and the RAID logic is implemented at the hardware level.

Pseudo-hardware RAID is similar, but requires some level of operating system 
support. Both Windows XP and Linux must have explicit support for the 
particular RAID hardware.

You'll find very little information on the net regarding hardware or 
pseudo-hardware RAID support in Linux, for the simple reason that most RAID 
implementation in Linux use software RAID, or soft-RAID. That's where the 
Linux kernel itself handles the RAID functionality. Linux soft-RAID works 
with any hardware. You may, for example, put one IDE and one SCSI hard 
drive, of the same size, into a RAID-1 configuration with Linux soft-RAID.

Soft-RAID has been, traditionally, the best supported RAID in Linux, for the 
simple reason that no special RAID hardware is required, and it works with 
pretty much anything.

Of course, Windows XP knows nothing about Linux soft-RAID, and it's going to 
be rather difficult to find a hardware and pseudo-hardware RAID solution 
that works both in Windows and Linux.

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