Ok, it's gravy, but lumpy gravy

[claudegiz]

Hello all, I am finishing building my first system, as you know. And although I thought once I had the system booted, it would all be gravy. Well the gravy is a bit lumpy.

My OS is Media Center 2005, and I have already loaded all the updates, well, as of last night. I have 4 hard drives. The first drive, a raptor, is my boot drive. XP is installed fine. The second hard drive is only for my pictures, games and music. My third and fourth drive will be the drives I use for the pvr portion of my system. I am going to raid them under JBOD. I want to format and partition these drives. I thought XP had a kind of partition magic application. If so can anyone tell me where to find it. Or, if it doesn't exist, I'd welcome advice on how to format and partition these three drives. I have a fifth drive that is in an enclosure, this drive will hold my documents, and backups. I'm going to load MS Office on this drive. I'm also going to format and partition this drive also.

Thanks for all the help


Claudeth

[pam123]

Please post your specs and check your motherboard manual for RAID set-up instructions and drivers shoud be on the motherboard cd.
Meanwhile Start>Control Panel> Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management will show you the second hard drive that you have to partition and format.
You will do that from within the operating system and you will need to do the same for the external drive .

edit : I would set up the RAID before I formatted the external drive.

[chuck4456]

You'll be 90 before you use up all of that space.

[claudegiz]

Ok, here are my specs.

My specs:

Case: - Thermaltake soprano with clear side.
CPU - AMD x2 3800
Memory - 2gbs Corsair Extreme
Motherboard - Epox 9na ultra
Power Supply - Maddog 550w modular
OS - MS Media Center 2005
Hard drives(all SATA): a) Raptor 36gb (boot drive)
b) WD Caviar - 160gb (music and photos)
c) WD Caviar - 250gb (pvr)
d) WD Caviar - 400gb (pvr)

The PVR drives will be set in a JBOD array.
For my documents and scanned documents, I am using a 160gb PATA in an enclosure,
Optical Drives: Rosewill 16x dual layer DVD +/- RW - PATA
Plextor 16x DVD +/- RW - SATA
Mitsumi 7 n 1 card reader with floppy

Added a front panel controller with additional 4 usb ports, 1 firewire, and audio ports
internal SATA host controller which has two ports. (needed an additional SATA port for the Plextor)
hauppauge 150MCE TV Tuner
EVGA 7600GT Video Card
Creative Audigy Z - sound card
Wireless MS keyboard and mouse
DSL

I think I'm good on the space. I'm an attorney by profession, so I am scanning all my documents, so I am going for a paperless home office. Also, I have a ton of music and will download more. Also, I dvr a lot of stuff, so with the 650gb, if an hour show is 1gb, I can fill the pvr in about 4 months.

Thanks for the advice Pam.


Claudeth

[glc]

Chuck, that post does not contribute to the thread and is considered post padding. Please don't do that again.

- Admin -

[pam123]

claudegiz,
If you're going to be archiving your music collection and doing dvr read this, and it's links, carefully : http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34523

[claudegiz]

Originally Posted by pam123 claudegiz, If you're going to be archiving your music collection and doing dvr read this, and it's links, carefully : http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34523

Thanks Pam. You Rock! I'm sure that you've realized I have a lot of components. So I'm working through each component, dealing with any issues, then moving to the next component. Right now I have a sound issue that I posted in the Video, Audio forum. Next would be the music.

So thanks so much.



Claudeth