Aleksandar Milivojevic alex@milivojevic.org wrote:
On 2000 Pro and XP Home/Pro, the option is there, but either grayed out
What is your "Disk Label"? "Basic" or "Dynamic"?
If you don't know, select: Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management Storage -> Disk Management
It will tell you either "Basic" (legacy BIOS/DOS pri/ext/log) or "Dynamic" (LDM).
Microsoft does not allow you do to volume management on "Basic" disks for the same reason I don't recommend people use MD on the same (and recommend LVM/LVD2 instead, even though MD is used for RAID-1 or RAID-5). There is no way to store meta-data pertinent to the RAID volume if you lose a slice. You _must_ use the LDM Disk Label to get _any_ volume management in NT5+ (2000+).
or there's popup screen informing you that it works only on Server and up (don't remember anymore). You need to have at least Server version of Windows in order to use it.
I don't know about XP Home, but I was fairly certain that XP Pro does very much do at least spanned (no RAID), striped (RAID-0, no redundancy) and, I believe, mirroring (RAID-1, redundant). RAID-5 (fka striping+parity) can only be on 200x Server.
Unless of course you managed to hack something in the registry to enable it (in which case you violated licencing agreement, and sure, I'd like to know how you did it ;-). Currently, the only software RAID option for 2000 Pro and XP Home/Pro are those fake RAID controllers with their specialized drivers (I'm not aware of any 3rd party general purpuse software RAID drivers for Windows).
There are a few volume manager suites out there. They are typically for servers (and priced at such) though.
Of course, all this holds only if Microsoft hasn't decided to unlock the feature in one of the service packs (which I doubt).
I think it's because you're not using a "Dynamic" disk. It _will_ be grayed out then. ;->
A quick search turned up the following MS KB articles:
[NT5.1] Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343/
Ah ha! You are indeed correct!
"You cannot create mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers."
They _did_ take out "mirrored" support of the "clients" in NT5.1!
Also note ...
"NOTE: Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers or on Windows XP Home Edition-based computers."
So XP Home can't do anything (I thought so, but wasn't sure).
Just for historical completeness ...
[NT5.0] Windows 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175761/
The LDM Disk Label (Dynamic Disk) was introduced with NT5.0. It solved the serious issues that many people had with the legacy BIOS/DOS Disk Label in "losing" RAID volumes back in NT4.0 and earlier.
So Microsoft _did_ remove mirrored (RAID-1) as an option in NT5.1 client OSes, from NT5.0. Interesting.