Therese, You are definitely making your life more difficult then is needed for a desktop machine.
You said you have 4 hard disks. Make a software RAID1 out of the first two. Make a software RAID1 out of the second two and your good to go. You can use dump/restore to backup the logical volumes on the second RAID set to an LV on the first. No need for bare metal restore. Just need to get some working Linux distro to be able to read your files. Going HW RAID for your desktop is going to get in the way of you getting things going and if your HW RAID card fails then what? Your drives will only work with another identical HW RAID card. -Ross ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: CentOS mailing list <centos@centos.org> Sent: Fri Mar 14 09:08:39 2008 Subject: RE: [CentOS] Recommendations for a “real RAID" 1 card on Centos box >>> You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well >>> (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown) >>> >> >> Hopefully you have a redundant PS unit. Having a UPS is not going to >> help if your PS fails. >> >> > > redundant power supplies connected to redundant UPS's. I've seen more > UPS failures than I've ever had failed PSUs on proper server grade hardware. This might be getting a bit elaborate for a desktop machine. I really want RAID because I'm tired every couple years of hard drive crashes and having to start from scratch and spending a week setting up new drives and getting my design software back on line and trying to recover data. What do you think of alternative back up systems, such as a tape backup with bare metal restore software? I'd go that route instead if I could fine a solution which would allow me to restore to different hardware, i.e. if my motherboard dies and I need to buy a different brand or model MB. I know Storix back up software has this capability - I use storix on my Linux server with RAID 1. @ home I have one Linux and one Windows desktop machine. _________________________________________________________________ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008_______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos ______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof.
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