multiple systems on raid 0?

[renderslave]

hello,
although i'm quite familar with system related stuff i'm absolutely new to raid configurations.
actually i'm using 3 OS (WinXP Pro) on one harddisk for different tasks (videoediting | soundrecording-editing | games-office). these setup is on one harddisk partitioned with 3 primary patitions and some logical partitions.
i'm using acronis os selector as bootmanager and acronis trueimage for creating backup images of my system.

now i would like to know if it's possible to have pretty much the same setup on an ide raid 0 configuration (my raid card is an htp370 based one, which i'm actually using as an additional non-raid ide controller).

maybe i should structure my question:

1) is it possible to have multiple partitions on a raid 0 configuration? if the answer is yes, can i use partition magic to create these partitions?

2) is it possible to use a bootmanager on a raid config. which one would be suiteable?

3) does anybody know which drive image tool is able to be used with raid configurations?

excuse my bad english :) and thx alot for all of your help.
cheers, renderslave

[Tex]

1) yes. and yes. remember on that card you really want to try and use like a 16k stripe and a 16k cluster size when you format for best performance.

2) Sure. If your using windows it has a bootmanger of course built in as does linux. If you want a 3'rd party package I used sys commander and liked it but had trouble with some linuxs with it.

3) most of them alllow the drivers to be loaded if you need special drivers. Stuff like your hpt will show up with no special drivers for drive image and ghost etc.. Ghost is more popular but I always liked drive image better myself.

Acronis true image is by far the best I have ever used but I didn't use it when I used to run hpt raid so I don't know if it works with that controller, but I have used it with my scsi raid controllers if that helps.

See you can't just ask if "such and such" works with raid in general. Its hardware specific.

Tex

[renderslave]

Thx alot Tex.
I know that it's always a question of a certain hardware and/or driver combination and so on. I'm just very new to raid in general and didn't know if my actual way for system backups or system installations will be possible at all with an raid 0. so it seems as if i could start the next days with building my new and fast system :).
Once more thx alot for your help.

greetings,
ande

[Missileman]

I got around this problem with my 2 RAIDs by putting in a plain vanilla IDE hard drive. I installed WinXP to it, the RAID drivers, and True Image. I just go into bios and set the IDE to boot, image off my RAIDs to it, reboot, set BIOS back to boot whichever RAID I want and turn off the IDE. Makes it easy to do backups and restores cause I always have a bootable OS with the RAID drivers installed. With hard drives being so cheap per Gb anymore it's one of the cheapest and easiest ways to back up.