Installing on RAID

[sfenton419]

Hi all,
apologies if this is a stupid question!!

I have a rather powerful setup at home, and am intending to upgrade it yesterday, that is, I purchased new drives and hit a problem straight away.

I do not like to have hard drives all over the place, in other words, ideally I would have 1 hard drive with all of my files stored under the "My Documents" fo;der in windows.

I currently have 4 x 500GB hard drives attatched as a single 2TB drive as my main drive, with the exact same connected on a second sata raid riser card as a backup drive (set with redundancy so only 1.5TB).

I have now run out of room and have purchased 8 x 1.5TB drives with the intention of 4 x 1.5TB drives for my main "C" drive and 4 x 1.5TB drives for my backup drive (again set with redundancy so only (4.5TB).

However when I tried to install Windows (Vista Ultimate x64) the drives were not recognised.

I then went back to my Raid setup screen and notice that the drive was not bootable, with no option to change it.

Basically what I am asking is, "Can you make my 6TB Raid drive bootable, and if so how?" or "Does windows have a size limit on the drives that it can be installed on?"

MY setup is as follows:

Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Asus Rampage Extreme 2
Intel i7 Extreme (not clocked, as I don't have enough knowledge to do so!)
12GB DDR 3 RAM 1600MHz (again, not clocked)
ATI 4870x2 HD 2GB (x2, crossfired)
2KW OCZ PSU

If there is anything else you need to knw, please contact me and I shall get you the info ASAP.

Thanks,

Shane

[Bink]

Hi sfenton419, welcome to HWC.

It was my understanding that Windows Vista (and most other flavours of Windows) could not boot from a drive greater than 2TB. This is only an issue with booting. If the drive is purely for data, then it can be considerably larger.

Reference:

Windows and GPT FAQ

...The maximum partition (and disk) size is a function of the operating system version. Windows XP and the original release of Windows Server 2003 have a limit of 2TB per physical disk, including all partitions. For Windows Server 2003 SP1 Windows XP x64 edition, and later versions, the maximum raw partition of 18 exabytes can be supported. (Windows file systems currently are limited to 256 terabytes each.)...

...16. Can Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?
Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for EFI-based systems....