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fredmorcos

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2008-09-01

Posts: 9

Website

Two Identical HDDs + RAID0 + (LVM?) + GPT & GRUB2 + Dual Booting

Hello,

I have been reading about RAID, LVM and GPT. RAID0 is interesting to me since I have two identical HDDs in my laptop and I am looking for better performance and less free-space fragmentation.

My current disk layout looks like the following:

sda:
Primary:
sda1 ntfs system-reserved
sda2 ntfs windows*

Logical:
sda5 ext4 root
sda6 swap
sda7 ext4 personal
sda8 ntfs windows2*

sdb:
sdb1 ext4 multimedia

*windows is the C drive and windows2 is the D drive, just needed extra space so I cut off a part of sda7.

What I want to achieve (and based on my understanding of RAID0) is the following:

GPT:
sdm1 windows
sdm2 boot
sdm3 root
sdm4 home (personal + multimedia from above)

I will use both sda and sdb for this.

Questions:

0. Is that even possible (considering windows)? My expectation is no, unless windows uses the same RAID0 implementation as Linux (partition table/layout data and whatnot). In that case, would it be possible to have something similar to the following:

GPT:
sda:
sda1 windows-c-drive
sdm1 boot
sdm2 root
sdm3 home (personal + multimedia from above)

sdb:
sdb1 windows-d-drive
sdm1 boot
sdm2 root
sdm3 home

* sdm1,2,3 are the RAID partitions laid out over sda and sdb.

1. I am not sure what LVM can offer me other than flexible movement/resizing of partitions, which I don't need.
2. Does RAID0 imply read/write parallelism? Which would provide better read/write performance?
3. Has anyone had experience booting Windows 7 on GPT + RAID0 shared with Linux? (As shown above)
4. Any suggestions as to how to reach my goal?
5. I will need to backup everything and reinstall windows and Arch with RAID, correct? Which I am ready to do anyways.

skodabenz

Banned

From: Tamilnadu, India

Registered: 2010-04-11

Posts: 382

Re: Two Identical HDDs + RAID0 + (LVM?) + GPT & GRUB2 + Dual Booting

Do you have a UEFI firmware? Otherwise you can't boot Windows from GPT disk. Linux will work with BIOS-GPT combo, but no idea about RAID or LVM.

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My new forum user/nick name is "the.ridikulus.rat" .

fredmorcos

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2008-09-01

Posts: 9

Website

Re: Two Identical HDDs + RAID0 + (LVM?) + GPT & GRUB2 + Dual Booting

I don't think I have UEFI firmware, looks like a standard BIOS to me. But how can I make sure?

fredmorcos

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2008-09-01

Posts: 9

Website

Re: Two Identical HDDs + RAID0 + (LVM?) + GPT & GRUB2 + Dual Booting

There is an option in the "BIOS" settings called "Enable UEFI boot". I tried enabling it, nothing changed at all (in other words, no problems arise).

Last edited by fredmorcos (2011-09-17 18:22:23)