Quite right once you have installed Windows, Most Linux Distro's I have used automatically detect the NTFS partition and give you a option to install Nix side by side on the same hard disk. I always Install Windows first when I'm dual booting my systems, Have had Windows 7 and Mint running over a year now no problems.
FreeNas could be a option haven't checked it out recently but liked it for being lightweight and easy to use, to setup a seperate file server.
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 11:30:52 +0000
From: andy@???
To: hampshire@???
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Dual Boot using Raid 1
Hi Mike,
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 10:05:30AM +0100, Mike Austin wrote:
[...]
> Following an upgrade of my desktop motherboard etc, I wish to create a dual
> boot system using 2 identical 1TB drives in Raid 1 (mirrored) configuration.
> I believe that I cannot have XP and Ubuntu on the same master drive, but
> will need to have XP on a 3rd drive. I can have 6 SATA devices on my
> motherboard, so 5 HDs.
>
> Another problem is that I want the media files used by the XP applications
> to be on the Raid drives, as a backup, on a NTFS partition.
Not trying to be glib, but RAID is not a backup. This will end in
tears sooner or later.
Anyway, I don't dual boot and I don't use NTFS so I'm not 100% sure
of my facts, but I see no reason why you can't put XP on the same
disks that you put Ubuntu on. Dim memories of having to install XP
first so that it didn't nuke the Linux bootloader.
XP isn't going to be able to do anything with the Linux software
RAID. With Linux you can also use each member of a software RAID-1
as a filesystem in its own right, if you are careful, but of course
as soon as you write to it the two halves would be out of sync. I
also don't know how well this will work under NTFS.
Would it be worth considering a solution with a separate file
server? This could be entirely Linux, easy to RAID, easy to back it
up to somewhere else, can serve everything out with samba for use by
Windows machines.
Cheers,
Andy
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