Quick question, please. About formatting master and keeping slave

[sn8ke]

A little background info:
Ok, I have a 40GB master, and a 160GB (149GB :rolleyes: ) slave. I had some problems with the slave when I first installed it. My bios and I guess XP had the 130gig limit (i think it's 130gig, right). Well I used Disk Manager (http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/) from Samsung on the Samsung 160GB drive. I don't recall what it did, but after that I still had some problems. I just said screw it and got myself a RAID card and hooked the 160gig up to it and I believe after that it was the full 149GB in XP. Now here is my question:

I am upgrading my mobo, proc, ram right now. I know this calls for a format, and I plan on installing a friend's old 10GB IDE drive along with my new hardware above and install xp on it real quick. Then i'm gonna hook up my 40GB master as a slave and backup all my files to DVDs and then format the drive. I will then set it as master and install XP on that, giving the 10Gig drive back to my friend. I'm gonna then slave the 160GB drive to the 40GB like I used to have. Will XP have a problem detecting the whole drive?? Will it only see 130GB or whatever and not 149? I'm afraid I will be losing some of the stuff on the 149GB drive since Windows will not recognize the large drive. Will just hooking it up to the RAID card solve this right away? I've never done this before, and had some reservations. The XP will have SP1 if that matters.

I guess that wasn't really a "quick" question, but thanks to whoever can answer it!

[arkamw]

The problem that you are referring to is the 32-bit LBA limit. Basically, it means that you have an upper limit of 137GB. What you need is to get 48-bit LBA addressing enabled. Windows enables this with SP1. Additionally, any add-in cards that you might be able to get should overcome this limitation as they use their own BIOS'es and driver sets.

So, in answer to your question, yes, once you have XP on the system w/ SP1 installed, you shouldn't have any problems at all.

Cheers.

[sn8ke]

Thank you for the very quick reply.

The RAID card I bought has 48-bit LBA which is the reason I bought that one. Should I go ahead and use it again, or should I trust XP SP1? I think I would rather trust the PCI device..

Think I should create a small partition on the 40GB C: for just XP this time around? Does it make things easier? I like to keep it as simple as possible which is why I don't really mess with partitions.

[arkamw]

Either the card or SP1 will work perfectly. It really comes down to personal choice. Personally, I don't like another peice of hardware in my system that adds unnecessarily to the boot times (though I don't reboot that much). Also, with the RAID card (and depending on the mobo) you are limited to the PCI bus bus in terms of overall data throughput that you can get out of it (i.e. ~133MB/s). That's normally not a problem unless you tend to saturate the bus with any kind of heavy data usage. Again, doesn't usually happen, so you should be okay.

Bottom line, your preference.

As to different partitions, there is a lot of talk about which is faster and slower, again, I tend to think that it's personal preference. I divide my 80 into 10GB and 70GB partitions. That way, in case the Windows partition is hosed, I don't have to pull out any extra tricks to make sure that my data doesn't accidentally get deleted. Does it increase the amount of work the drive does? Probably, but that isn't my argument to take up or defend (that's what data backup is for). I simply have my setup which works the way that I like it to. It doesn't really make things easier to install, but I think it's easier to organize and keep things safe.

Again, your choice.

Cheers.

[sn8ke]

Ok, cool. The motherboard is a Soltek K8AN2E-GR nForce3 250Gb (http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/soltekK8AN2E-GR/index.html). It has onboard SATA RAID and most likely has 48bit LBA. I will probably just try the 160GB out like a regular drive and if I have any problems with XP and it, I will either hook the drive up to the onboard raid or my pci raid card.

I guess I will just install xp without a partition. If I need to format again, DVDRWs have made backup much easier.

Thanks again