[dba-Tech] Boot off of D: drive

LOL, you dance mighty pretty.

The raid is all set up and working.  I have three volumes.  The issue here
is that I think I need to:

Edit the boot.ini to make the changes mentioned.
Copy the boot.ini to what is now my f: drive, a new 340g volume on the raid
container.  
Once that is there, I need to get rid of, i.e. change the drive letter of
the C: drive to get it out of the way.
Change the drive letter of the F: drive to C: so that the boot.ini is still
on the C: drive.

Reboot and pray.

It is at this point that I get cold shivers down my spine.  This is a
functioning system.  I do not need a non-functioning system!

The raid is on a card in the backplane and is recognized by the bios etc.  I
do not use the motherboard raid for the simple reason that the speed sucked.
I am doing these large databases in SQL Server and I need speed.  I have the
Areca 1220 card which has a co-processor, 256 mbyte ram cache and can handle
8 SATA2 hard drives with command queuing etc.  I then attached 8 Seagate
320g hard drives so I now have Raid 6, using all 8 drives, creating 3
volumes.  

Unfortunately I chose not to just do a full on system rebuild when I
installed 2003, since I was not convinced at the time that it was going to
work at all, never mind solve my problems.  It did work, and did solve my
problems, at least as much as can be solved at my hardware / cost level.

I now have a raid that shows sustained read times up close to 300 mbytes /
second which is pretty damned fast IIDSSM.  Writes are about the same as any
of the single drives taken alone - 60 mbytes / sec or so.

It all works just fine, I just have no need for a C: drive that is 80gb and
non-raid when I have 2.4 tbytes in 3 raid volumes, booting off of one of the
smaller raid volumes.  The raid volumes are so fast that it actually slows
me down to use the individual drives for anything.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John Bartow
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 3:23 PM
To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Boot off of D: drive

This really depends on your RAID. You should be able to install the new
disk. Format it appropriately and add it to your RAID via the RAID's UI. If
onboard the motherboard there is usually a keystroke to get into the RAID
configuration during boot up. If its an add-in card then there's usually
some instructions that come with it or online with the manufacturer. OK, did
I dance around that one enough ;o)

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby

2) Get rid of the C: drive and slide a raid drive into it's place.

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