unstriping my stripe set
I have two 40 GB IDE drives in a stripe set, no parity. winxp is doing the raid, they're not on a raid controller or anything. is it possible to unstripe them and not lose all the stuff on them at the same time? i want to free up one drive to put linux on it. I know this probably a no answer, but i fogured I'd check first.
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Google Linux+LVM (Linux Volume Manager)
Volume size limits are way up into the Teras now with Linux.
Unfortunately, you DO get to undo your volume and restore what you want afterward if it breaks or you want to undo it-- and that is true for 90% of operating systems including Linux and Windows.
Back up files as files, not volumes as volumes or you will get to recreate your volume to restore.
If you can, boot from a HD not in volume-- volume were designed for data, not boots. (not kidding, boot volume needs tobe at least separate from data so you can restore separately). Technically, while you can in some ways resize with expensive software(Server data recovery and volume restore utils are expensive), it takes as long or longer than backing up and restoring HD to HD or from one directly connected computer or networked computer to another after redefining and trashing the volume.
I would make boots non-volumed, and data in large amounts volumed. And it is worth doing the backup\recovery process once to learn it.
If XP were not so finicky about moving its boot location, things would be better, but as it is your best bet is not to make boot part of volume and volume only the data. XP does not apprciate being told to ignore HDs, either.
That means an EXCLUSIVE multiboot box is best for this-- swap out a HD instead of trying to boot two OS's on one HD. I do never let XP know its computer was used by anohter O\S. XP boot HD slides out of coldswap rack, Linux HD slides in.
to get data from one to other, easiest thing is to make a one HD FAT32.
Then you have that HD as common to either as both can handle FAT32 readign and writing with minimal issues. My data HD gets labelled and its carrier labelled as such, and goes in a second bay-mounted coldswap rack. Then can back up by pulling it and sticking a backup target in.
Answer-- while you CAN do what you want to do with LOTS of effort, it takes less effort and money to do what I do now overall.
John Danielson.
No you cannot put Linux on the Dynamic Raid if that is what you are thinking. It requires XP to manage it.
You probably also have it formated as NTFS. Linux can read it but not write it....yet. I have everything in FAT32 so I can access with either OS.
Here is a thread on Dual Booting Windows and Linux.
I think that the Enterprise products from PowerQuest can operate on dynamic volumes, do not know if they can resize XP's kind of dynamics yet. Either way, both are not economical for what is needed. CD-RW or DVD-RW would be more economical, if used as backup media and then reused later when not needed to store that backup.
John Danielson.