ajbird

Hi folks, I have striped raid array consisting of 2x60 gig maxtor hdds the raid performance is dreadful and is slowing the system down to a crawl (the highpoint raid conroller that seems to be slowing everyone else down) i have troubleshooted this to death and have decided to give up (the thing went like a rocket after a fresh install of XP but speed has dwindled as the disk have started to fill up) so i want to split the array up and go back to haveing 2 x 60 gig hdds so i figure - 1) borrow 2x40 gig hdds 2) copy 40 gig of ducuments and downloads off the array to 1 disk which brought the program files / xp installation down beloew 34 gig 3) resize xp partition to 35 gig - copy the raid partition to the other 40 gig disk using the copy mechanism in partition magic 4) un plug raid to make sure all works - plug new xp boot disk into ide chain and switch on 5) boot off xp cd and goto recovery console - run bootcfg and tell XP that it is going to boot of this disk from now on. and thats where things went wrong - it refuses to make a boot.ini or make the disk bootable - it simply says that it cannot do that - it detects the windows installation but will not create a boot.ini iff try to rebuild the mbr it tells me that this is not a standard mbr am i sure - i say yes and it seems to rebuild ok but will still not create the boot info. - it looks to me that the xp equivalent of sys c: is required but not sure how xp handles such things? i am now stuck. Help me ....... is there a better way to split the array and not lose the data? or is my cloned raid array never going to boot? i have the 2nd disk - can i make this the boot disk - it does not seem to want to do this? i really want to avoid starting my xp setup again...... incidently - i have never managed to get the computer to boot off the raid array and have relied on a old 15 gig hdd to boot off - this is dying and i fear it will not last much longer hence the prompt to get things fixed. thanks andy

cheers for the help guys have given up and started to rebuild the pc from scratch - arghh bloody hell i forget every time how painful it is to get this thing to the point where it is useful. nightmare thanks

i think you need a floppy disk prepared for that and err well, a hum.. I dont! bugger

err how? just reinstall windows over the top of it? will that not destroy my reg?

it says something about - could not find system disk - which is what makes me think i need the equivalent to sys c: as in the good old days.

what are the advantages of having all these different partitions? is there any proof that this helps at all? andy