Jimmy,

Thanks for the question.  It made me review my MCSE book.

The system and boot partition cannot exist on a Raid-5 volume, which is a
striped array with parity.  Spanned, mirrored, and a standard striped
volumes do not seem to suffer from this issue.  At least, my book didn't say
that there was an issue.

In any case, I would suggest a separate system and boot partition (a.k.a.
volume in Windows 2000) anyway.  I would also make it a Fat32 partition and
only 3GB or 4GB.  The reasons are pretty straightforward.  The OS itself
requires no encryption as there is no sensitive data.  It's the user files
that get stored on the system that you want to be able to encrypt.

That in and of itself is not a strong argument for keeping your first volume
Fat32.  However, if the OS itself becomes corrupted, trying to correct the
problem through a recovery console can prove frustrating.  On the other
hand, if you have a Fat32 boot partition and a Windows 98 boot disk, you can
access all of the boot partition without trouble.  Not so if it is an NTFS
partition.

This is, of course, my humble opinion.  Hope this helps.

Kyle Elmblade
[log in to unmask]

From: "Jimmy Fikes" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 12:17 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] OS on RAID disks?


> When setting up Windows 2000 server on a machine with a 10GB IDE boot
drive and a rack of 3 SCSI RAID hard drives, is the OS set on the boot drive
only?  It is my understanding that the OS resides on the boot drive and the
RAID drives are for programs and data only.
>
> Jimmy Fikes

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