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xp dual boot raid 0 insanity cool down

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nudone:
encountered another potential problem now - i don't have ps2 connection on my motherboard and 'paragon drive backup' doesn't detech my usb mouse or keyboard when booting from the recovery cd so it's pretty useless if i have a big system crash.

can anyone recommend a drive backup program that will work with raid drives and detech usb keyboard and mouse when using its version of a recovery boot cd?

thanks.

db90h:
My 3.6 cents would be:

1.) Don't worry with hiding drives. System Restore will not get confused. Long expanation: I've never heard of a case of system restore having issues with dual-boot setups. That said, if you reconfigure system restore settings, the changes might be partially propogated to the other OS installations, as the system restore data is going to be stored on the partitions to which its applicable, and therefore may be shared between all OS installs. Its usually ok to share this data, since the partition's image is the same no matter which OS you are booted to.

Furthermore, Windows NT based OSes are designed to allow for dual-boot.

So, don't worry so much.

2.) If your drive backup program (and/or BIOS) doesn't see the USB keyboard/mouse, simply use the neato USB->PS2 adaptors included with every USB HID device ever created ;).

nudone:
whoops, i thought i better check around the back of the machine - yep, it's got ps2 connections, so all is well for the moment - i can use paragon drive backup by the looks of it.

db90h, thanks for the reassurance about the system restore and dual booting issue - i must say everything appears to have worked fine so far.

db90h:
I had missed the part where you had said you couldn't find PS/2 ports on your motherboard.. yep, they should indeed be there ;).

Indicidentally, if you really want to hide drives in XP (or any NT based OS), you simply need to unmap it. This is done through Control Panel(classic)/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Manager. Right click on a drive mapping and you can remove its mapping. By mapping, I mean like 'D:', or 'E:'.

A cool feature of NT/NTFS is that you can also map drives into folders of other drives. i.e. "c:\drive2" can reference some totally different partition. Drives can be mapped to multiple locations too, as you'll see.

In addition, a related feature, junction points, aren't so readily exposed by the OS to the user, but allow you to create 'virtual folders', in that a folder points to another folder. i.e. "c:\myfolder1" is actually "d:\somefolder". SysInternal's Junction utility will create these junction points for you.

For my own set-up, I always map the folder "c:\dev" to my development partition. This way I have a static path to my development projects no matter what partition they are really on.

Oh well, I'm off topic. These virtual folders are very useful, but Microsoft has so far not made them so readily apparent to users because it seems to confuse the average Joes, and Mrs. Joes.

Tootalloo. Good luck on ur dual boot experiments. You might consider just using VMWare to host client/guest OSes under a primary host OS. This makes it really easy to create snapshots of the installations, revert them to a specific state, and isolate the OS from your physical computer. Someday this will be what we all do, as virtualization is improved at the hardware level by new CPUs. For now though, client OSes still run quite smooth..sometimes smoother than the host OS, since VMWare will, by default, force more client virtual memory to remain resident in RAM than under normal conditions.

And of course there is VirtualPC, which is arguably easier to use than VMWare.

nudone:
some great points there, db90h, i shall certainly be trying the virtual drives method and may try unmapping also but it seems unnecessary as things are working okay - i was concerned that i would run into problems because the last time i tried dual booting it was with windows 98 (may also have been win2k) and things did become a little confused.

i'm lucky enough to have vmware installed (one of the first prizes/donations i received from DonationCoder and greatly appreciated it is too) so i understand your comments on using virtual operating systems.

my main reason for going the dual boot way instead of a virtual OS was that i'm intending to use a single operating system for video editing. i tend to install a million and one things on my main system and this always seems to cause trouble with programs like adobe premiere. unfortunately i don't think we've reached the point of a virtual system being able to cope well with video encoding/editing - i'm sure within the next few years, as you say, virtualisation will be able to cope with anything as our machines become quicker.

(when i say problems with adobe premiere, they aren't consistant problems, i just know that things aren't quite right - maybe my clean OS install will not help at all and it's more of a hardware issue - i just know that at present this machine isn't working perfectly and i'm not prepared to accept it any longer.)

if i could keep my main xp install working without all these annoying little quirks then i wouldn't even dream of dual booting but it seems that sometimes you just need to keep things 'clean'.

thanks again, db90h. you've certainly given me something to play around with.

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