Thought this might be interesting to a few of you. As most of you can know, and if you don’t I sure hope this is your first visit. That I’m a linux person. However, I don’t run just one os on my dev box, because it also serves as my gaming box. Since I got two identical drives, I decided to do a raid array. I’ve never set one up and decided it’d be fun. This is naturally mistake number one when it concerns installing Windows. *note linux people I am installing gentoo as we speak so I’m not a traitor* The following is my experiences with installing with raid in linux and windows.

Boot up windows and just sort of scratch my head as to why its not recognizing the raid array since it supposedly loading the proper driver. I try the normal nvidia slots and still get nowhere. Little do I know I need to make a boot disc (without having a floppy drive) that has the driver on it. Get that done after I rip apart another box for its floppy. Start the windows install and just wow at the speed of the Raptor 10k drives.

After the setup files copy and the first reboot happens , I start counting how man it takes to have a fully patched updated system. Take a guess at how many it took…come on guess. Good; I assume you have a number now. It will hopefully be 16 reboots to get windows patched and add the drivers for my nvidia cards. That’s a LOT of rebooting to get a operating system running in a fairly secure method. This also includes downloading over 400 meg worth of patches. For those interested that’s about 3.8 times the size of the open office source. With all the reboots and hunting down the software I actually needed, it ended up taking 4-5 hours. Microsoft listen well, your 1 hour install time is in reality a 4-5 hour grueling process of frustration. Vista better have usb driver loading ability at a minimum. If i can boot off usb, I better be able to load drivers from it.

Now tonight I’m doing the linux install. What’s the requirements for getting my raid to work….modprobe raid(level), making a few nodes, and running the following a number of times # mdadm –create –verbose /dev/md0 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1. That’s it. Not a hassle really. Now because of gentoo being from source, my install is still going 5 hours later, but I’ve had a working system that is really only doing updating of packages for 4 hours of that. Course with the number of times I’ve installed gentoo I can do it mostly blindfolded. Only real mistake I made was missing one driver for the raid, and causing a kernel panic.

I’m happy with linux, and I’m back to stabilizing things once again. I’m happy about that, since I’ve been annoyed at just being able to only advise people.

looking forward to your bugs.

Also come join us in #gentoo-x86 to help us out with testing. We can use it, especially if you would like to see x86 stable the way stable is meant to be said not in those silly quotation marks.

P.S. for you Gentopia users I maintain a backup of the project for just such occasions as its going down (note no updates are added here but you can download the last active ones) from this location