Friday, September 28, 2007

New machine

I've received my new machine that I ordered and managed to get it installed and working. It has been working great so far. Part of the challenge of this machine is to get Linux and Windows in a dual boot configuration on a RAID-0 array. Well, after puzzling for a day or two, I managed to get things done.

I installed Windows first. For this, just follow the steps in the manual. You'll need a single floppy disk with the RAID drivers on it, then you allocate a portion of the RAID array to Windows and the rest is similar to what you are used to.

For Linux, you'll need some more work for installation. I use Ubuntu and booted from the regular Live CD. Then I followed parts of this guide first:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

But I did not proceed with the installation of the software. A very important step is the mkswap / swapon commands, as this will otherwise stop regular installation. I actually continued from the LiveCD installation of this guide:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=464758

So, the use of gparted is totally unnecessary. I partitioned using dmraid and fdisk, then formatted with mkfs and set swapon/mkswap as in the guides. Then immediately started the installation process and finished off as in the second guide.

My total system has Intel E6850 dual core, 2x1GB (667Mhz) low-latency memory in dual-channel setup and 2x10,000rpm WD Raptor drives of 75G each in RAID-0 configuration.

2 comments:

Daniel Melo said...

Hey, what a machine man!! I hope you are going fine up there in Holland!! see you!

Gerard Toonstra said...

Sure am! Where are you from?