RAID0 Partitioning issue

S

sram

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 30, 2007
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It was my understanding that a RAID volume is treated as a single drive and you can easily split it into partitions using your favorite partitioning tool. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case in my system. I have two velociraptors in RAID0 for my OS drive(two 300GB making a 600GB drive). I now use vista64 and decided to try windows 7. I don't want to upgrade vista, so I decided to dual boot. The first thing I thought of doing was of course to create a new partition to install windows 7 in. I put my Partedmagic cd into my optical drive and restarted, started the partition editor and created the new partition, however, when I hit apply it starts the operations but doesn't progress no matter how long I wait. I downloaded the latest version of Partedmagic thinking that the one I had might not support RAID0 partitioning. I ran the program again, but strangely enough, it showed the two drives separately with no ability to do any modifications to them. How come? Aren't they supposed to be one drive??? And why did the older version recognized them as one drive, and tried to re-partition it but failed?

Anyways, long story short, I can't re-partition. And creating new volumes using the raid utility will mess up my OS I think.

I don't want to lose my already installed/configured OS, and start all over. Can there be a fix?

I'm thinking of making a new disk image of my OS drive using acronis true image, delete the current raid volume and create two new ones and then load the image into one of the volumes and install windows 7 into the second volume.............what do you think? Will this surely work??


Thanks
 
Don't use Partition Magic on RAIDs? It may have worked on just one drive, and now corrupted/deleted your data.
 
Ah, it uses GParted partition editor, and that one is actually quite good (same i use on Ubuntu Linux).

Ok here's what's going on:

You are using FakeRAID; meaning onboard RAID. That's actually just software RAID, as drivers running on Windows perform the RAID functions. When you boot into anything other, those Windows-drivers do not function and thus all the OS sees is two harddrives.

One solution is to use an Ubuntu livecd, which uses md-raid to create a software RAID out of your two harddrives. It does this automatically, because it can read the RAID configuration format that is stored on the drives. This contains properties like RAID type, stripesize, number of disks and disk order. In most cases, these all work out and the software RAID device is created and can be used by programs like GParted. So Ubuntu livecd would do the trick.

But - why don't you just partition using Windows? If you have one large C: and need to shrink, Windows can do that after freeing up space and degragmenting, then use Shrink command in the Disk Manager. If you just need to create an additional partition, you can do that in Windows right now, or even when installing your new Windows OS. You do need to supply RAID drivers, but then it should see your partitions fine and would allow you to create partitions to install Windows to.

So you don't really need GParted, though Ubuntu+GParted can be used on your driver-RAID array.
 
Interesting, very interesting. Acronis disk director should have worked then. But, why did older versions of Gparted saw the RAID volume and not two single drives? I thought once RAID is enabled in BIOS, any drivers would be there before you can boot into anything.

Also, what is this shrink command in disk management? It is not exactly a partitioning tool, right? I thought windows should not have a partitioning tool because who will need third party software if this proved to be the case?

Anyways,I used the shrink command and was able to isolate about 170 GB of the RAID volume and created a new partition with it. I wonder why it only allowed me to take out 170 GB though because I had like 420 GB free.

Anyways, it worked. Shrink command did it all for me! Was much easier than what I expected, and windows 7 rocks.

Thanks sub,mesa, and sorry for the late reply.
 
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