Gone Done Somethin' Crazy...

[KRSESQ]

Set up my system as follows: Reformatted primary master (17 gig Maxtor) into 2 8 gig logical drives (c: & d: )and my Fasttrak 66 RAID 0 setup (dual 30 gig Maxtors) into 2 30 gig logical drives (e: & f: ).

Installed Win98SE on the c: partition and then ran WinXP Pro setup and chose advanced. installed XP on the d: partition under NTFS. Dual boot setup successful. Reformatted f: partition to NTFS from within XP.

The two OSs left to themselves run perfectly, almost. As expected, actually. I have PD 5.41 and VT 1.52e (G200 Marvel) set up in 98 and PD 5.82 and the leaked VT 2.04 in XP. Capture in 98 is fine using VT. Harddrives test a little slow in the Matrox benchmark.

XP doesn't capture at all even with Picvideo MJPG codec installed. Harddrive test speeds are much improved according to Matrox benchmark, but capture is out. I'm having trouble getting it to play Matrox MJPG .avis brought over from the FAT32 drive e:.

What I'd like to know is how Fdisk arranged the logical drives in that RAID? Did it make one drive FAT32 and the other NTFS or did it split each drive in half?

The rig:
Athlon 1200
Abit KT7A w/ 384 MB PC133
Soundblaster 16 ISA

What's YOUR successful driver/codec recipe?

Kevin

[Radu]

Fdisk will only see a big fast hard drive. The actual splitting of information, data arbitration, etc.. is the responsibility of the HW RAID card, and it's drivers.

But making one drive contain an NTFS partition and one FAT32 kind of beats the purpose of a RAID0 setup in the first place, don't you think ?

My guess is that both partitions are split on the drives. If it is not, then it is definitely a bug in the promise drivers.

The algorithm you use to actually store the data on the disks may(and usually is) be proprietary and company dependent. Few companies share a standard (I don't even know if one exists)

[Ted222]

Radu is right. On your Promise Raid you should set it as one logical drive for the best performance, then partition it as NTFS for the large file support.

Note: The Raid will only be visible and usable when you are running XP, but the performance and large file support are well worth it.

Reference your capture problem, what video card are you running. There are inherent problems with XP and XP Pro with some Matrox cards. You might want to search the forum for others running XP and your video card. AND check with your capture software compatibility to XP also.

Good luck,

Ted

[KRSESQ]

My plan was to capture in W98 on the FAT32 half of the RAID and then migrate the files to the NTFS half for long-form editing. But any effort to display the Matrox-captured files in XP gave me a BSOD. Otherwise things worked surprisingly well. RAID scores in XP were good and scores in 98 were passable.

Gone back to my original config (W98/FAT32) and will just have to work around file-size limits the best I can for now.

Ted: I was hoping the right driver combo would give my G200 Marvel SOME functionality in XP. Guess I'm just an incurable romantic.

Kevin