Hello.

It's been years since I've truly backed up my computer.  I used to do a tape backup on my Dell 166mhz back in 1996 but I haven't had any failures - ever - that have caused me to lose anything, although I've seen quite a few at work.

But I've decided to stop living 'on the edge.'  I recently did have an experience on my new rig (Athlon 1900+ with 2 80 Giggers at RAID 0) where I hooked in another hard drive to read data off it, and somehow my boot sector got overwritten and I could not boot off my RAID 0 configuration.  I tried everything - I had no idea what I had done, but since only Windows was installed, it wasn't hard to just reinstall XP Pro.  But it did scare me some.

So now I'm left with the prospect of using Ghost to create some decent backups on a fairly regular basis.

I've been through the guide here and through the SatCP Ghost Boot tutorial with no luck.  I have no config sys at all after going through that tutorial on my floppy.  The Norton Ghost wizard does create a working boot floppy using option #3 but not #1.  When I load with option #3 I get all kinds of Aspi2, Aspi4, and Aspi8 errors - but it DOES load, I have access to all my CDs, and Ghost seems to be able to read my RAID 0 drive (at least it brought up the correct # of bytes to image, I didn't see it actually reading through files.)  But I couldn't access the drive through any drive letters.  Only the CDs.

So now I'm left wondering what to do.  Do I use Partition Magic to make another partition to send images to?  Or, do I buy another hard drive and install it for my images?  If so where do I put it?  For optimum RAID 0 performance I have 2 hard drives each on a separate channel (one HD per IDE cable.)  My other channels (regular non-RAID) are used by a CD, a DVD and a CD/RW.  Maybe I should ditch the CD and just use the DVD for CDs and put a third hard drive up there?  And when I do that, based on the experience I've already had, how do I know I won't accidently wipe out my RAID drives?  I think I know the answer to that one - when my BIOS says that something is trying to change my boot sector, I say "no" not "yes."  :-]

Anyway, advice appreciated.

You make a good point.  I have seen controversy over RAID-0 since I started.  I will tell you that I'm booting into Windows XP Pro (NTFS) in about 6 seconds with 2 plain vanilla 80 gig Western Digital ATA-100 drives.  I have not done a comparison to see how RAID-1 or non-RAID would be.

Can you shed some light into why my Ghost boot disk does not access the array through a drive letter and how to fix that?  And why I get all those failure in the ASPI drivers?  Maybe I should read your ASPI section, huh 

Yes, I was just trying to give some semblance to saying that, on a very unscientific level RAID-0 feels fast.  But considering that I upgraded everything else, who really knows.

So it makes sense to you that Ghost can see the drives but PC-DOS did not assign the drives a drive letter?

And if I went through the ASPI section here I could figure out all those rolling errors that I get on my boot disk and maybe even make a boot CD?

Oh, and do you have a guesstimate of the compression ratio on Ghost images?  I'm trying to figure out what size HD I could squeak by with for now.  Thanks.