Best Way to Set Up New HDD's?

[Valaire]

Hi all.

I am setting up a new computer and am actually just waiting for the motherboard to come in before I can start playing with it. I have everything else installed in a mid-tower.

I'm getting the Gigabyte board with the KT400 chipset that has onboard RAID. It's a Promise controller. I bought two Maxtor 80GB ATA133 HDD's and am interested in setting them up in a striping array. My complications are this:

1. I've never transfered/backed up a harddrive before.
2. I've never set up an array.

I've done a lot of research the past few weeks but I just want to check with people. My dilemma is that I have my old harddrive and I want to copy my programs into the new array. It's not partitioned and has irreplacable software on it. I also have Windows XP. I had upgraded from an earlier installation of Windows 98SE and so didn't have a clean install which I would have preferred since it's overall hailed as a much safer solution.

What I want to do is:

1. Partition my array similiar to Hammerbot's model in a previous post, leaving 5GB for the boot partition, 50 for programs, and the rest for data.
2. Make a clean install of Windows XP on the boot partition.
3. Copy over my programs to the next partition reserved for programs and copy over previous registry settings so that the software will function in Windows (is there an easy way to do this, or will all the paths be incorrect if I just import the registry, and will this have an adverse effect on my clean install?)
4. Copy all non-program data over to the other partitions like MP3's, videos, documents, etc.

I've heard people talking about Norton Ghost, DriveImage, DriveCopy, and Maxtor's MaxBlast Plus... what is the easiest solution for me to get exactly what I want?

Also, what clustersize and stripesize is best for the Promise controller... I don't think I'll be manipulating big files. I know this is a subjective question but I'm willing to just go on faith cause I don't have the time or want to actually test each setup.

Thanks in advance, I've been stressing about getting my old information over for awhile now, and any help would be appreciated.

-Chad

 

[HammerBot]

I always use PowerQuest Partition magic for HD partitioning, manipulation etc. Its also possible to use a number of other tools, but I have no pratical experience with those. Especially not when it comes to doing it on a RAID array.

If you make a clean install of XP, you should also do a reinstall of all programs. Copying existing registry settings is almost impossible. Further, as you said paths may be wrong and system specific settings will not match. This is not the way to go. You will need to reinstall all programs.

The easiest way to go is the following:
1) Attach the new harddrives, go to the RAID bios and setup your RAID array (and stripesize).
2) Make sure you have a floppydisk with the RAID drivers. Boot from the XP installation CD, and press f6 when prompted to install third party RAID or SCSI drivers. Insert the floppy.
3) The XP installation will give you the option to format and partition the drive. Partition the drive as you see fit and format using NTFS.
4) Proceed with installing on the boot partition.
5) When your system is up and running, attach you old harddrive to the normal IDE controller. Reboot windows and copy all data to the new drives. If you are not going to use the drive for anything else, I suggest you leave it connected and use it for backup.

The problem with the above method is that the installation of XP will format the partitions with a default clustersize of 4kB.

Therefore you may want to do the following:
1) Attach the new harddrives, go to the RAID bios and setup your RAID array (and stripesize).
2) Attach the old drive to the Normal IDE controller.
3) Install XP on the old drive on top of the old installation. Do not format the drive since this will delete your data. If you have multiple partitions on the old disks, you may want to move the data away from the boot partition to be on the safe side.
4) Boot on the old drive. From within XP partition and format the drive with NTFS and the clustersize you prefer. (You can do that from Disk management or the command line version of format).
5) At this point you may want to run some benchmarks on the array and experiment with various cluster/stripesize combinations.
6) Once the array is formatted and partitioned as you want, install XP on the boot partition of the array. Make sure you have a floppy with the RAID drivers, and dont format the drive during install since this will reset the clustersize to 4kB.
7) When XP is up and running copy the data from your old disk.

(phew... Someone ought to make a FAQ on RAID0 partitioning, setup etc.)

Also, what clustersize and stripesize is best for the Promise controller

Is that board using the PDC20276 controller? In that case Im sorry to inform you that this controller has a fixed stripesize of 64kB :frown: . I have heard some unconfirmed rumors about a hacked bios that allows you to change it anyway, but Im not sure how this works.
Im using 16kB stripesize and 16kB clustersize on my WD800JB. However, some drives prefer a different stripesize. So I always suggest to do benchmark, since you cannot change the clustersize of an NTFS partition when there is data on the drive.
With 64kB stripesize, Im not sure what influence the clustersize will have.
This <A HREF="http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_hdd_shootout/" target="_new">shootout</A> has a lot of comments on stripe/clustersize and also some links to further (and lengthy) forum discussion. Note especially what is being said about PCI latency and the VIA chipset. Im not sure if this also applies for the KT400 chipset, buts its worth checking out.



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