Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex at 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. -- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org Sent from Yahoo Mail (please excuse any missing headers)