RAID 5 and Vista

[tewas]

Hi,
I'm thinking about moving from XP to Vista Ultimate 64-bit and i'm wondering if my current RAID 5 setup and all my data will survive the movement or i need to get hard drive and back up my data?

Now i have 4 physical internal driver: 36 GB Raptor where my current operating system lives and where i plan to install vista. Other 3 drivers are WD 320GB configured in RAID 5. Will Vista need some other drivers and at the same time wipe out my current data in there?

Thanks for responses.

 

[gbhall]

You would certainly be wise to get an 'add on' hard drive (USB attachment) for backing up everything important to you. This is extremely desirable, as many people confuse 'raid' with 'backup' and it is no such thing. Whatever goes wrong/gets corrupted/deleted/infected in a raid array is broken - period. Whatever is in a backup is safe from corruption - period. Make sure you do drive imaging as well as backup.

When installing Vista, you would do best to dual-boot XP and Vista (for a while anyway). This requires you to shorten your C: drive partition to make approx 10Gb free for Vista. I am afraid I do not know if Vista will enable you to do this during installation, though I have learned that Windows 7 does support such an approach.

In the absence of partition modifications during Vista install, I can recommend you download GPartEd to do this job before-hand. Then during Vista install, make sure you select the empty space and enable dual-boot. As to support for raid, much depends on whether or not this support is on the motherboard, is an add-on card, and if onboard, goes down to the bios level, or depends on OS drivers. In the first case, Vista will just see a standard drive, in many cases, you need to install OS drivers early on during the install, but Vista and modern hardware do not require that. Check your motherboard manufacturer site for your exact motherboard, where there should be full instructions as to what to do. There are so many possibilities, it is best to know what to expect first !

On recent boards, you can set bios options such that an IDE mode is enabled during install. Then once XP/Vista is correctly installed, genuine motherboard drivers can be installed to provide the full facilities of your Raid layout.