> What kinds of problems with xp so I can check.<snip>

I started off thinking I would use XP Pro to undertake software RAID (just
like you can in W2000) only to discover it is not a feature of XP! (you can
only span or stripe disks)  So I bought a couple of RAID IDE cards from
Maplins.

In a rather (hindsight) gung ho approach to this particular PC, I installed
two raid cards with 4 discs on each.  One of the disks was my (C:) boot
drive,(to be)paired with an unused identical hdd.  The system booted ok at
this stage, so I proceeded to use the raid card bios to set up raid sets on
each ide channel.  

At that point bye-bye OS!  XP just would not boot at all, even after I
backed out all my changes (including removing new raid cards etc.) which was
a bit frustrating :-(  I suspect something to do with how the raid card bios
marks the physical drive as part of a raid set - but I didn't feel like
conducting further experiments with my boot drive.  Fortunately I had taken
sufficient back-up measure and, with some effort restored the PC to a
working condition.  All this is ironic when the objective of mirroring the
C: drive was to provide a greater level of resilience.

So currently not mirroring drives under XP - but would like to hear of
others experience...

BTW - striping a couple of drives to use as scratch/cache space under XP Pro
does give a significant speed improvement (stripe drives over different IDE
controllers) - but of course no fault tolerance, so would only recommend for
scratch type uses.

HTH

Phil 



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