Norton Home Office PC Build
I would like to say that things went well and smooth. I’d like to say that I had this system up in a jiffy and was up and running in no time.
But no. No no. I had no such luck.
The thing is that after spending half your life tinkering around with computers, you grow overconfident. You learn how to do things much like the quintessential dude lost on his way to someplace thinks he’ll manage to get back on the right track: you poke and poke until it just works. That’s always how I’ve done things with PCs and it’s worked until now. This time, I had to look it up. And I’ll tell you how to do it right here, so you don’t have to.
The machine was ready to boot. I had a 64bit version of Vista Ultimate to install and two 1TB drives ready to mate in wonderful RAID love. Three days and a whole lot of headaches later, I figured how to do it. Note that this will work with nForce 4 to 7 chipsets.
1) Before you start, this is the most important step: Go to nvidia.com (on another computer, of course) and download drivers for your motherboard. Extract the files and put the entire “SATA_IDE” folder on a thumb drive.
2) On the new PC’s first boot, enter the BIOS. Usually pressing the “Del” key will take you there.
3) Most BIOS settings differ, but sound similar. In this case, you had to navigate to “Advanced > Onboard Devices > SATA Mode select > Select RAID mode.
4) Hit F10 to save and exit.
5) Once it boots up again, you’ll see an option to “Enter RAID configuration” by pressing F10. Do so.
6) The next screen will show you all the available drives. Select the ones you want to setup an array with by sending them to the right with the Right Arrow. I want to setup RAID 1, so I chose “Mirror”.
7) I suggest leaving the block size at 64k.
Press F7 to save your configuration.
9) You will be prompted to “Clear MBR”. Do so.
10) On the next screen you will see your newly created array. This one was 934GB in size. Make it bootable by pressing “B”.
11) Press Ctrl-X to exit.
12) You have now created and configured your RAID array. You computer will now treat it as one hard drive and you’re free to install Windows… But that process is slightly different with RAID. That’s why you downloaded those drivers. So…
13) Once you boot up again with Windows in your optical drive (which you set to be the first drive to boot, through the BIOS. This is a normal procedure when first installing a new OS), go through all the initial prompts. This includes choosing language, EULA, version of Windows to install, entering product key, etc. After the EULA screen, press “Custom (Advanced)”.
14) Insert your thumb drive with your drivers on it.
15) On the next screen, press “Load driver” and navigate to the SATA_IDE folder.
16) Select the nVIDIA nForce SATA Controller and press next.
17) You’ll then see the two drives as one. Create a partition and format, and then continue installing Windows normally.
So there you have it, bliss in 17 easy steps. Yeah. Right.
But I have a fully functioning 64-bit version of Vista, ready to put Norton Security 2009 to the test.
How will I do this? Not sure yet. Here’s what I’m thinking.
I’ll install common office programs. MS Office, etc. Just to have an office environment. I’ll then install a common Norton competitor, like AVG. I’ll measure a few metrics: Installation time, installation size, memory footprint, boot time when installed, complete system scan time.
I’ll then measure effectiveness? How? I’ll setup a list of stupid things to do: open spam emails, visit dangerous sites, etc. I’ll see how good a job it does protecting my PC and how long it takes before I get infected with something, if ever. I’ll then (oh my, lucky me), scorch the entire thing, format the drives, re-install everything and do the same thing with Norton.
Then, we can compare. So, stay tuned!
Comments
[...] Setting Up RAID 1 [...]
I’d suggest disabling UAC in Windows before installing anything. Working for a non-profit software company, I’ve seen UAC rip our software (and many others) apart during the installation and just won’t work right. This is especially true if the software is heavily dependent on the registry and any ODBC settings. Usually you can re-enable UAC if you wish to after any installs though and the software will work right…usually.
I’ve set up many RAID arrays, especially RAID 1. If I was using this computer as a production computer, there is no way that system would have only two drives. I typically put three hard drives in and have one physical hard drive be the OS drive. The OS drive is typically smaller in capacity and faster in data access than the other drives. The other two drives are typically larger capacity, maybe slower hard drives to store mass data.
In my setup, I can format and reinstall my OS at will, without disturbing my data.