Apple Software Raid 0 and Vista

[JollyRogers]

I had bought 2 1.5T 7200rpm drives when SL came out. Originally was running one for SL and the other was just sort of hanging out. I use a TC for TM and it backs up regulary. I have a seperate MBR drive with Vista on it for occasional gaming. Also, have another bootable SL image.

Well decided to try RAID0 for my SL boot drive to pickup some speed because of the beach balls I was getting during disk IO when working with videos in iMovie and FCP. It went well migrating from TM backup (as a test vice the extra image I keep) and the increased speed is noticeable.

The only problem... Vista(32b) crashes soon after booting! So I booted Vista in safe mode and disabled the raided drives in device manager. Now it Vista boots just fine. I understood Vista would not "see" the raid, but did not anticipate it crashing! Any other ideas to work around the this?

Regardless, just wanted to post the issue I was having with Apple Software RAID - and Vista crashing in hopes it may help someone else and what work around helped me.

One other thing I noticed, when I use the option key for selecting my boot drive, I see a Snow Leopard 1 AND a Snow Leopard 2? Haven't tried to boot off the SL 2 drive... Is this normal?

 

[Abidubi]

You can't run any other OS off of a software raid made in OSX. Only OSX know how to interpret it.

One other thing I noticed, when I use the option key for selecting my boot drive, I see a Snow Leopard 1 AND a Snow Leopard 2? Haven't tried to boot off the SL 2 drive... Is this normal?

Yes that is normal, I have the same thing. It is just that until OSX reads the drives, the computer see them as 2 separate drives. So when you click on 1 to launch it, it will only then start working with the other drive. Both 1 and 2 are the same thing.

 

[Tesselator]

I dunno the problem but my Vista 32 and 64 work fine in both Bootcamp and Parallels with no crashing and I have a 3-drive "software" RAID0. My RAID drives did not occupy Bay1 though. Try that. Try putting the Vista drive in Bay1 and see if that helps. That's the only thing I can think of.

 

[JollyRogers]

You can't run any other OS off of a software raid made in OSX. Only OSX know how to interpret it.
Yes that is normal, I have the same thing. It is just that until OSX reads the drives, the computer see them as 2 separate drives. So when you click on 1 to launch it, it will only then start working with the other drive. Both 1 and 2 are the same thing.

Not trying to run Vista on the software raid, it's on a separate drive... Thanks though regarding the answering regarding seeing 2 boot drives from the RAID.

I dunno the problem but my Vista 32 and 64 work fine in both Bootcamp and Parallels with no crashing and I have a 3-drive "software" RAID0. My RAID drives did not occupy Bay1 though. Try that. Try putting the Vista drive in Bay1 and see if that helps. That's the only thing I can think of.

Tesselator, thanks. Yes my RAID 0 is in bay 1 and 2 with my Vista drive in bay 3. I can try moving them and seeing what happens. Like I said, I disabled the 2 drives that are software raided and Vista acts fine now.