
There is a wide choice of hard drives from established players such as Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital. For home or office use, a single disk is usually sufficient. But for enterprise networks, a cluster of several disks is often essential. The only problem is that these so-called RAID arrays are not exactly cheap.
Many motherboards have already built in RAID controllers, but not all of these are suitable for fileserver applications. Most of them only support the simple modes 0 and 1, and the combination of both called RAID 0+1 (striping & mirroring). While high capacity as well as outstanding performance can be accomplished by RAID 0, the risks of losing data due to a broken drive multiples by the amount of drives likewise. A happy medium between performance and data security can be achieved by a RAID 0+1, mirroring two RAID 0 arrays. The only downside is that the net capacity will be split in half.
If high capacity is first priority, the common option is a RAID 5, which distributes data to all array members and adds rotating parity information, too. The net capacity of the whole array is the sum of all drive's storage minus the capacity of one single drive. However, this solution is not as simple as it seems. Calculating the parity information as well as the real time reconstruction of data in case of a defective drive requires a lot of CPU performance. This forces the user to either buy a pretty expensive RAID controller with a built-in XOR unit, or to rely on a cheaper model that burdens the CPU with the XOR calculation.
So, why not use the RAID 5 software option? If the budget is tight and the usage of a simple RAID controller without the XOR unit is a possibility anyway, software based RAID 5 might be an equivalent choice. RAID 5 that Windows Server offers can include all existing drives, rendering a RAID 5 controller unnecessary. However, if you only need file services, not even the expensive Windows Sever license is needed, since WindowsXP is capable of sophisticated RAID functions after only a few modifications.
The feature that you want/asking about is called X-RAID
For those of you wondering, I was able to get my data back by installing Server 2003 and importing the RAID5 drives. No data lost, WHEW! You can also use a trial Windows Server 2003 to access your data for 30 days. Get the download from here.
To get it to work with SP3, you just have to redo the changes above.
To get it to work with x64, just locate those same strings in the files and apply the changes. Notice how the changes are only swapping the locations of the words SERVERNT and WINNT. I'd post the exact changes here, but it would take forever to type out all of those hex values. UltraEdit doesn't seem to allow one to copy the hex data to the clipboard.
Anyone has a solution for this?
Is there a way to get those SP2 files from somewhere please? Else i think i might try the server2003 solution.
As for the "re-activate the drive every time I reboot" it has happened to me in my old PC after the mod, but could not find a way to solve it
What if i copy the files, install SP3 again and just replace them with the current ones? Do you think it might work? Or i will end up needing "reactivate the drive every time i reboot" ?
When I did this, I can boot fine, it recognized the array automatically (as healthy too - no rebuild needed), and I do not have to start it or anything.
dmboot.sys starting at offset 00011070h, the hex between brackets are the only bytes you need to change:
00011070h: 54007900 70006500 0000[5345 52564552
00011080h: 4E545749 4E4E5400 0000]0000 00004C41
dmadmin.exe starting at offset 00001C38h, the hex between brackets are the only bytes you need to change:
00001C38h: [77696E6E 74000000] 00000000 6C616E6D
dmconfig.dll starting at offset 00005140h, the hex between brackets are the only bytes you need to change:
00005140h: 4C414E4D 414E4E54 00000000 [57494E4E
00005154h: 54000000] 00000000 53455256 45524E54
Note the new offsets for all but dmconfig.dll. Don't forget to backup files you mod (before and after).
HTH
J
i have this solution working but there are major problems. My data transfer speeds have really really slowed down. Another issue is that whenever i reboot it shows that the array is rebuilding again. please help
Anyone have any benchmarks to confirm?