i saw an article at tom's hardware on enabling raid 5 under windows xp, which involves hex-editing some files...

i was wondering if it could be applied to the source xp files (by hexediting them and recompressing them with makecab)...

the files needed to be hex-edited were: dmboot.sys, dmconfig.dll and, dmadmin.exe.

although i already tried hexediting the files, im hesitant if it will automatically enable raid5 support once i re-compress the hex-edited files.

note: the article at tom's is somewhat not consistent with my setup, especially at the dmboot.sys file... the offset was different on my setup. i am using winxp pro.

Using dynamic disks, you can create and delete simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, and RAID-5 volumes.

Why do you have to hack files to achieve what is already available?

Unless this is for XP Home, which no mention of in the article?

sorry for the late response, but do you mean XP Pro already has that feature?

You can do RAID configurations with the diskpart.exe utility.

Why would you want to install XP Pro on a RAID 5 array? Is there something specific you are trying to accomplish?

RAID 0 or RAID 1 would seem to make more sense for performance reasons.

RAID 5 maximizes disk space. RAID 1 halves your disk space. Help him with his problem, don't criticize his choice

I thought using WinXP to do this is actually creating 'software' raid, vs using an actual raid controller to do this... which Ive gathered isnt really recommended.

In respons to Durex:

Software raid5 slows your performance for about 10% compared to hardware raid.

The problem with hardware raid though is that when your controller blows up and it cannot be replaced by the same type, you need to reinstall your raid-set loosing all your data.

On the other hand, trusting microsoft to never fail a software raid....

i was wondering, does winxp pro already support software-based raid5? or do i still need these modified files that the site i mentioned tells?

You need to modify the files. Only Server2K3 normally supports software RAID5. That being said, I don't think you'll be able to build a RAID array during XP Setup and am not sure how it would handle an existing array.