Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: slsimon on December 15, 2007, 02:52:40 pm
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Has anyone attempted to run Mame under a Windows Server OS? Reason being that I am contemplating this is the fact that I recently bought 2 750GB SATAII harddrives as well as a PCI SataII raid controller and of course my board does not support this card. I was hoping to use the Sata card to implement a disk mirror dup copy of the first drive. I am going to be using the drive with mame, jukebox, and multiple other emulators so I thought that it would be a good idea to implement sometype of reliable backup solution.
So now I can't use my PCI Sata card, I was wondering how Mame would run under a Windows Server OS. The server OS should have a built in disk mirror config setup.
Other than that idea, I am not aware of any other software disk mirroring application that can be installed on a Windows XP Professional system that will perform seamless on the fly disk mirroring. Anyone know of such a software application that will perform this task without user intervention?
Thanks for any updates.
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You can create a RAID in regular versions of XP and Vista. You just can't boot from them because the RAID can't be set up until Windows has started. The solution would be to throw a cheap hard drive in the machine to boot off of. Install windows on the small HD and put everything else on the RAID.
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If you have a hardware RAID controller, then you want to configure the drives on that before you begin the Windows installation. This can be accomplished through the RAID BIOS during boot. You should see a comment on what keys to push to access the BIOS configuration.
You say that your board doesn't support the card, so does that mean you have an alternate machine you'll be installing 2003 Server on?
Regardless, the setup is the same. Configure the drives through the RAID BIOS and then run your XP/2003 install. You will be prompted to push F6 during the beginning of the setup if you need to specify any RAID drivers. Push F6 and when it gets to the point of needing the drivers, you will be prompted to put the RAID driver disk in. From this point, you can load the RAID drivers and the Windows setup will detect the drive configuration you setup previously.
This is the optimal way to configure the RAID since you've got the hardware controller already. If you plan to use software RAID, it will work, but there is a lot more overhead in that process which may affect Windows performance.