Re: Hard Drive Configuration

You use an Imaging program, eg Acronis True Image, as was suggested in your
origonal post

"chesjak" <chesjak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:DE4D26B5-6DD2-4896-9A69-30533B9D957D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Shenan

Thanks for your quick reply.

Regretably, I was told that by the manufacturers tech support who, I think
are somewhat wanting when it comes to technical queries.

All I want to be able to do should the same problem occur in the future is
not to have to reload my third party programmes again. I already backup
by
data to USB sticks each day. However as you pointed out if the main H/D
with
Windows on it goes anyway, the Registry entries for the various programmes
will be lost as well.

It seems there is no way of stopping the labourious task of re-loading all
the programmes again should there be a serious problem on the Main H/D
with
windows on it.

Thanks for your help once again.

Regards



"Shenan Stanley" wrote:

chesjak wrote:
I have been told that "most people" set up their system with two
H/D's so that say in my case with a 160Gb and a 500Gb drive I
install the operating system on the 160Gb H/H and then all my
programmes and data etc on the 500Gb.

This would aparently overcome the problem I had recently wher I
tried to do a Windows restore in XP and for some unknown reason it
corupted the whole H/D and I had to re install everything.

Is this so and would it be better than setting up the H/D's in RAID
1 configuration.

How would this work, would I make the 160gb or the 500Gb H/d the C:
drive.

Would this slow the system down at all. How convenient is it
rather than having everytghing on one H/D.

Who told you this "most people" garbage. If anything - I would say that
"most people" do not know what their setup is - as they buy their
computer
and it comes loaded up and ready to go - like any good 'appliance'.

As far as overcoming whatever problem you had... Looking at that short
description and concluding you likely mean a System Restore from within
Windows XP (given your wording) <-- probably a setup where you system
drive
and data drive were seperated would have benefited you.

Now - also given what you have (160GB and 500GB drives) - RAID 1
(Mirroring)
would be an enormous waste of resourses. You would be mirroring a 160GB
drive to a 500GB drive and losing a LOT of usable space. Also - going by
what you have given with what happened to you before (assuming the
hardware
did not go bad - this was all software) - a RAID 1 setup would not have
helped. Everything that went wrong on the first disk would have been
mirrored (particularly if you have a hardware RAID 1) to the other drive.

I am not a big fan of mirror arrays - as they only really help you
recover
from hardware issues (where one drive physically dies a quick death.)
It's
much better to just have good backups, imho.

In your case - sure... Install Windows XP on the 160GB drive. How you
partiton that (and the 500GB) is up to you. Know that having your
programs
installed on a second drive/partition will give you little protection
from a
problem that causes you to rebuild your system partitioon (install
Windows
afresh) - as you will have to install most programs over again as well -
even if their installations were on a seperate drive/partition. This is
because they still write files to different places on the system drive no
matter where you install them - and then there are the multitudes of
registry values they might have. Having your data elsewhere - that's a
good
thing. It does not mean you shouldn't also hook up an external; hard
disk
drive aand/or use a CD/DVD writer to periodically back your stuff up -
but
it does make things easier should you want/need to wipe the system
partition.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html





.

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