Can you mirroring in Windows XP

[daveo]

HI everyone,

i was trying to backup my machine, and rather than spend heaps of money (that i need so dearly ) is it possible to mirror your primary hard disk to ur secondary hard disk

if it is possible, can u help me in doing so.... i'm pretty poor when it come to this stuff

And are there any other ways of backing up ur computer if the event was that ur whole hard disk failed... are there other ways of backing up ur hard disk constantly like mirror.... how due to the money shortages, are there free methods or methods that Microsoft provides

thanks all, ur help is appreciated

[N1K]

You can use mirror set (RAID1). U must convert basic disks to dynamic disk if you font to create software RAID and then through disk management create mirror set..

You can also use disk imaging app, like norton ghost or Acronis true backup and create and image of your system disk to another disk..

The second solution would be better 'cause RAID1 writes data on both disks so the performance would be slower..

[daveo]

Yeah......

well wat u said is a little bit to advanced for me dude,

could u like slow down, cos first of all where do i find this RAID 1

and the Acronis and all that is it free or do u have to pay for it

if it is free where can i get it?

This Disk managment thing, i read about it a little but it said that it was found in Windows NT, i tried to look for it in Windows XP but couldn't find it

am i looking in the wrong places, WHERE SHOULD I LOOK?

[MCT]

acronis isnt free

& your motherboard has 2 support RAID for it to work

[N1K]

MBO must have RAID controller if you want hardware RAID...

If you have Windows 2000 or Windows XP u can use software RAID..

RAID is short term for Redundant Array of Independent Disks..

RAID1 is mirror set...

Right click on my computer and then click manage, you'll access computer management and from there you can use disk management...

If you're not familiar with this terms, maybe it's better to let someone do it for u..

[daveo]

no the thing is that i am familiar with this term....

its just that in this new topic i was looking for more or less a way of mirroring ur hard disk through windows xp with out having to buy anything extra or buying an more cables

just simply:

1. Windows XP

2. 2 hard disks

3. writing on to two hard disk simutaneously (the same data of course)

4. Without buying anything else

all i want to know is that can this be done

and if not can you download a program from the net that will enable this to be done

thanks for all ur input to

[MCT]

what u want 2 do is hardware raid1 i believe, i dont know that this can be done via software (for what u want 2 do)

[daveo]

so ur answer is No

that mirroring using software is not possible

however wat made me consider this was that in WINDOWS NT i read that it had the ability to do hard disk mirroring and the connection of the hard disks did not matter

they simply were a primary and a secondary hard disk

but i'm sure that it would be possible to have a bit of software that recognises that something has been written to the hard disk and just copies it and writes it to the other hard disk

But thanks for all your help again

although i am a beginner, i'm learning a bit more, cheers all

[MCT]

thing is tho, if theres a software program that does that, it'd be WAYYY 2 heavy on system resources, everytime u move a mouse, your mouse movements are recorded via registry & ALOT of small stuff that'd be hell for a program 2 do without getting bogged down, someone may know of something tho, just wait & see

[N1K]

To configure software RAID, a disk must be configured as a dynamic disk.

A physical disk that provides features that basic disks do not, such as support for volumes that span multiple disks. Dynamic disks use a hidden database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and other dynamic disks in the computer. You convert basic disks to dynamic by using the Disk Management snap-in or the DiskPart command-line tool. When you convert a basic disk to dynamic, all existing basic volumes become dynamic volumes.

Although software RAID has lower performance than hardware RAID, software RAID is inexpensive and easy to configure because it has no special hardware requirements other than multiple disks. If cost is more important than performance, software RAID is appropriate. If you plan to use software RAID for write-heavy workloads, use RAID-1 instead of RAID-5.

RAID 1 - Disk mirroring. Data is mirrored on two or more disks. Provides fault tolerance, but at a higher cost (space required is double the amount of data). Read performance is increased as well.

[xiphias]

Guys,

First off, The "hardware" RAID controllers that the vast majority of you are using are *NOT* true hardware RAID; they're "firmware" RAID or simply put it's software RAID done in a BIOS chip of a cheap motherboard controller. There is no performance difference between these motherboards and software RAID, as all of the work is done on the CPU in either case thru a driver. If you want server-like performance you'll need an actual PCI RAID card for about $100-$300 depending on how fancy you want to get about it.

Next, a little about software RAID, which does dramtically increase disk performance and overall system performance for any OS; the reason mainly being that any time your OS needs I/O from the swap file it normally has to wait, oh, 2000 or so clock cycles to get to that data. That wasn't a complete sentence, but anyway, software RAID (or firmware) is implemented in a driver for the OS. The problem with this is Windows has to boot up and load this driver first before ANYTHING on this RAID volume/array can be accessed. In nix's (Linux, Unix, Solaris, BSD, whatever), this isn't a problem because all the bootable stuff is on a non-RAID partition, and the actual kernel, modules, init stuff, etc. can be accessed after the OS loads the raid drivers.

In windows, a.k.a. your issue daveo, this is not the case. Microsoft calls the part of windows that actually does the booting (ntfs.sys, ntdlr, NTDETECT, boot.ini) the "system volume," and the rest of the stuff under Windows\system32 the "boot volume." It's confusing; I know. Usually they are the same thing C: but this doesn't have to be the case. Read on here:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documen...stem_volume.asp

(Yes, that's all one line). It applies to server 2003, but should work for XP Pro as well. RAID 1 makes two simultaneous writes to each disk everytime you write a file. It's fault tolerant, meaning if one hard disk fails you can replace it with the same model and be back up and running again in an hour or so, by copying the contents of the other disk onto the new one. It also makes for significantly faster disk reads because the driver reads half the blocks of data from disk 0 and the other half of the blocks from disk 1 AT THE SAME TIME. If you follow the instructions above that is the ONLY way to get a bootable software RAID setup in Windows. Firmware RAID has the (small) advantage that Windows can pretend that it's hardware raid and put the driver into a small un-RAID'ed part of the disk, usually at the end or right after the MBR and partition tables. This way, you don't do the Microsoft software RAID, the driver simply makes call to the BIOS on your motherboard's RAID chip.

Hope this clears it up a bit,

xiphias

[Marsden]

Unlike RAID-0, there is no preprocessing done on the data before it is sent to the hard drives. Instead, with RAID-1, a duplicate of everything written to drive 0 is written to its mirror drive at the same time. The benefit of RAID-1 is that if one drive fails, you have a perfectly working backup that can take over until you have replaced the failed drive. You have effectively doubled a single hard drive's mean time between failure by using two in a RAID-1 array. You'll notice that this is the exact opposite of RAID-0, but the downside to RAID-1 is that you spend twice as much on hard drives without getting any additional capacity or performance, just reliability.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile... unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

[D.Celt]

Without 3rd party applications, only server class Windows support RAID mirroring.

Operating systems on which mirrored volumes are available