xp dual boot raid 0 insanity cool down

[nudone]

you may remember i went out and spent 3 months wages on new pc around christmas time. i asked several questions at the time as i had a specific setup in mind for the new machine - dual booting, etc.

well, since that time i pretty much just installed a single xp pro on the raid 0 drives and then carried on installing programs as you normally would - nearly two months have passed since the machine was first run so now it's beginning to display little quirks that i'm beginning to get sick and tired of.

general use of the computer tends to work fine - but some programs tend to hog one of the cores on the cpu in an abnormal way (i know it's abnormal because they don't do it every time) and eventually the machine grinds to a halt until i log off and back on again. so, i decided it was time to risk the dual boot setup on the raid 0 drives - reassurance from Carol gave me good reason to believe it wasn't that difficult to do.

i think i've spent the last 12 hours (time has become meaningless to me at the moment) attempting to get a 2nd install of xp onto the computer. i've finally got it to work but i can't understand how ridiculously troublesome it was to do.

i'm writing this as a means of calming myself - i was ready to put a hammer to the computer as that appears to be the only language it wants to listen to but thankfully, as i said, it's working now.

during the process i've discovered that:

i need two identical floppies to install the nvidia raid drivers - i have to put one floppy in which then fails and the swap it with a second floppy which then install the drivers. i've checked each floppy in two computers and they are completely error free.

i have to use a very old disk with sp1 integrated into xp pro for the install to work - if i use one of a number of other cds i have made with different flavours of hotfixes and service packs integrated into them the install fails at different points. these aren't random points during the install either, oh no - they are moments specific to each cd. i've also checked these cds on another computer and they are error free and install windows perfectly fine.

one cd install will detect usb straight away but failed after that (can't remember the reason now) and another takes about 5 minutes to detect my usb keyboard and mouse after the setup procedure is finished - luckily i found this out at a low point when i was ready to slit my wrists and couldn't be bothered to reset the machine.

i shall spare you any more tiresome details.

i wouldn't complain but i just can't understand how temperamental a computer can be - talk about being moody.

i'd like Dr. Gregory House (from the tv show House, M.D.) to get himself and his team to analyse my machine - they always manage to resolve an exotic decease type situation, i'm sure they could tell me why my pc behaves like a psychopath.

anyway, oh joy, it's now working. i must remind myself that it is now working. on to the next system malfunction. i can't wait.

[mouser]

it sounds like you might need the computer anger management class that i 100% need.
one time i was screaming at the computer so loud that my neighbors came over to find out if i was murdering people.

[nudone]

mouser, i had forgotten about such things but you have reminded me of how annoyed i used to get too. i obviously don't encounter illogical pc problems at the rate you still do - wish i could define why that is exactly - maybe i just expect the worse nowadays. i tend to chuckle with a twisted grin on my face instead of shouting - well, i do shout but it's that muted whisper kind of shouting where your neck aches from the strain of holding the noise back.

i did once punch a pc tower off the table and then kicked it around the room until the case sides came off - thankfully, it worked perfectly too when i plugged it back in.

anyone heard of 'computer anger management' classes - might be some money to be made there - i'm sure there would be plenty of customers.

[nudone]

on a more sensible and serious note...

now i've got dual booting up and running - is this going to create weird problems with things like system restore and drive indexing?

this is how i've got the drives set at the moment but it doesn't have to remain this way if there is advice to change it:

three physical hard drives but two of them are in raid 0 - the raid drive is split into 3 partitions, these are currently drive C, E and F. the other hard drive is currently drive D.

C and E are the drives with windows xp installed but i'm planning to put xp onto drive F also.

i'm wondering, as these partitions/drives are all visible to one another are they going to interfere with things i'm not aware of.

will my operating system on C become confused by the system restore files that the operating system on drive E uses. likewise, will the E drive OS get upset about drive C's system restore. and even worse, how is each operating system going to keep tabs on the other drives when using system restore.

should i just disable system restore?

i remember in the past when using some kind of boot manager (xosl, i think) i could hide partitions from each other - i don't think xp can do this on it's own but i don't really want to spend the next 12 hours trying to get another boot manager to work - unless it's simple to do.

as always, your thoughts are greatly appreciated...

[nudone]

tweakui will hide the drives but the hidden drives aren't really hidden from the operating system - just hidden within windows explorer.

[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.

[mouser]

i have always found dual booting more trouble than its worth.

i agree with db to use a virtual machine if you have a single primary OS, and then want some others where speed is not an issue.
if you really need multiple operating ssystems that you switch between often that must run fast -
buy another pc and connect them via lan.

as good as the vmware and virtualpc tools are these days, its hard for me to see cases where dual booting is worth the hassle regarding boot managers, etc.

[nudone]

thankfully i've not needed a boot manager other than the menu that automatically appears after installing the 2nd xp OS. if the secondary windows xp had installed how it should in the first place then i would have been perfectly happy with how things currently are.

i shall have to see how things go when messing around with video and then i will know if this has been worth the trouble.

as for buying another pc, well, this machine was meant to be my 'ultimate' machine so i could get rid of the other so so machines i've still got connected via lan (they aren't turned on though).

i have to admit that the bottom line is that i mess around far too much on the computer and don't actually do the things i should be doing on it. if i only did 'work' on it then i'm sure i wouldn't have found myself in this situation at all as i'd only have a limited set of programs installed.

using vmware has certainly helped me out and i'd definitely recommend it to all.

[Carol Haynes]

on a more sensible and serious note...

now i've got dual booting up and running - is this going to create weird problems with things like system restore and drive indexing?

Shouldn't do.

What you can do is in each version of Windows disable restore on the other installation drive (leave it enabled on the current system drive). Personally I would disable it on all but the system drive in each case.

Indexing? Do you keep that running - it is the one service I always switch off immediately after install. It is resource hungry (clock cycles and disk space) and doesn't seem to acheive a lot. If you must use it then again disable it on the other installation drives within the management console. There isn't much point in indexing drive E when you are running windows from drive C.

[nudone]

thanks Carol. i did the system restore thing as it seemed the most logical but i left indexing alone - normally i turn it off as i hardly ever search for things anyway.

i shall turn it off now, thanks for reminding me and confirming that it's of little use.

[Rover]

Need more traffic...protestant post;....

[Carol Haynes]

Need more traffic...protestant post;....

Eh? Keeping taking the happy pills ...

This is what happens when you get more traffic ...

[mouser]

hahaahaha