Vista, XP & Ubunty Tripple Boot on a Software Raid?

September 9, 2006 6:40 PM

I managed to trash my partitions today trying to install Vista RC1 and dual boot XP (my fault, I did something stupid). Anyway. Since I'm starting from scratch I was thinking it would be amazing to install Vista, XP & Ubuntu, but I'm not sure I can even do that. My problem is that I'm doing a software Raid (0) of my system drive. I know with my old computer it looked like a nightmare to get Ubuntu and XP to share a software raid and I was hoping maybe things have improved, or that my new motherboard/raid controller might work better now though. What do you think? Can it be done? Thanks!

System Specs:
Motherboard: Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe/Wireless Edition
2 60GB Raptors in a Raid Zero
- Raid 0 SATA using the NForce controller, not the Silicon Image one.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (AM2)
2 GB Ram
Dual XFX NVidia 7600 GT (usuall running one per monitor, not in SLI mode).

posted by chrisWhite to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Doing RAID 0 in software for 3 different OS is pretty much an excercise in futility. Doing it in hardware RAID, if you just stick to striping like RAID 0, and don't have any parity protection to calculate, may be possible, but it may not mean much in terms of performance, for the considerable drop in reliability you incur.

RAID 0 on 32 bit Windows XP doesn't mean much, as Anandtech has posted some time ago, and as I detailed here on AskMe a while back. And if the version of Vista you install uses the old SCSIport, instead of StorPort, as its disk interface, you'll have the same issues. (You need a miniport driver that calls to StorPort, whether or not you use SCSI drives, to get past SCSIport's miniport related problems).

Ubuntu disk drivers for RAID hardware are also your limit issue. You may not be too impressed with your performance improvements compared to single SATA or RAID 1.
posted by paulsc at 7:06 PM on September 9, 2006

Hack Attack: How to triple-boot Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu.
posted by furtive at 8:01 PM on September 9, 2006

So it sounds like I should ditch the RAID then. Thanks for the links guys, that was very helpful!
posted by chrisWhite at 8:19 PM on September 9, 2006

I run Software Raid 0 in xp for 2 primary drives, and ubuntu on a secondary drive.

It was accidental as the first ubuntu install ate the xp partition, so it's not completely recommended :)

I find raid 0 makes a nice difference for day to day activities, contrary to what the benchmarks report. That's just me though. It's definitely worth it.

I am tempted to install Vista though.. heh
posted by Lord_Pall at 6:14 AM on September 10, 2006

If you do install Vista on your RAID drive, I have had luck with Vista honoring the RAID if you begin the Vista install in XP, not just booting from the disk.
posted by chrisWhite at 9:51 AM on September 10, 2006