Harddrives

[Stefaan100]

I have an Asus P4C800E-Deluxe board. Was using the Promise Raid for mirroring, but I have to rebuild the array fairly often. So now I was thinking of just putting both SATA harddrives on the Intel controller without Raid, but just as C and D. Then I would use retrospect to duplicate the C drive to the D drive at the end of each day before leaving my office.

A. Can I use retrospect to copy the entire drive, including the operating system? I assume so. The idea that is one drive gives up, I could just booth up from the other one.

B. How do I install those HD's then? I assume as two seperate drives, while I boot to the C drive on a daily basis.

 

[ski]

The RAID 0 configuration has already saved a mirror image of the boot drive onto the backup drive, so you should not have to backup to it again with Retrospect.
However, you do have the option of formatting the entire backup drive, and using Retrospect to save the contents of the boot drive, including the O/S, which Retrospect is supposed to do during the initial backup.
Then, you should be able to use Retrospect to do incremental backups of up applications, files, and folders that were added to the boot drive since the previous backup.

Connect the boot drive to the 1st SATA port and the backup drive to the 2nd one on the Intel controller, go into your MB's BIOS, select the boot drive as the 1st boot device and the backup drive as the 2nd boot device(these will be 2nd and 3rd, respectively, if you select the floppy drive as the 1st boot device), and save the changes. You should be able to boot from the boot drive.
If the boot drive ever crashes, and the system no longer boots from it, then it should automatically boot from the backup drive.
But if the still attempts to boot from the crashed boot drive, then disconnect it, reconnect the backup drive as the new boot drive, and the system should now boot from it.