Hi there. I'm making a personal request from some experienced with computers, operating system installation, GRUB, and driver support.
I'm getting a computer built for me (yeah I'm not building my own, I actually found a better deal from a company that'll build it for me and they're giving me a lot of freebies including a fairly good air cooling system), and I'm worried that I'm going to run into problems because I've never installed an operating system before from scratch.
Firstly, my primary concern is physically installing the hard drives. I want to set my PC up in RAID 0+1, but right now, I only have two Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drives for RAID 0. I want to wait until I can afford two larger capacity hard drives to put them into RAID 1. Can I set this RAID configuration at a later time or do I have to install all the hard drives at the same time to accomplish RAID 0+1?
Secondly, I've never installed an operating system on a brand new computer before. From the main screen, would I go straight into BIOS to configure the RAID set-up, and if so, how do I do this so everything will be configured like I want? I'm planning on installing Windows 7 64-bit BETA operating system on this new PC, because the operating system is free right now, and I feel there's no point in spending $100 on Vista when 7 will be released soon enough. How can I go about installing Windows 7 64-bit OS? Will I have do download it and burn an ISO file onto a CD to install? I'm guessing if that's correct, from there I just follow the on-screen instructions?
Thirdly, being that I am going to be installing an operating system that is not currently stable, I'd like to install GRUB, so that I can also install and dual-boot into openSUSE Linux 64-bit OS until Windows 7 comes out of beta. It's kind of like my back-up plan in case something goes wrong with Windows 7 or if I get tired of it, or it gets released officially months and months after Windows 7 beta retires; I still want to be able to use my new PC. Also, how will I go about installing the OS? Should I do it via partition or something?
Finally, here comes the trouble that I'm anticipating: driver support. Will Windows 7 be able to work with my hardware, or will I have to update drivers somehow? I'm sure I'll receive some installation discs, but will they work with Windows 7? I don't want to have any hardware compatibility issues, with either Windows 7 or my Linux distro OS.
Lastly, I do have a few n00b questions, such as where do I install the HDD onto? The HDDs in RAID 1 right? Nothing gets written on the HDDs in RAID 0 right? I'm just confused about that... Also what HDDs should I make partitions on for my Linux OS, and how large should they be in GB (recommended)? I plan on having 2x 500GB HDDs in RAID 1...so that's not 1TB we're looking at, it's really 500GB of data. Should I make the partition 250GB, or 100GB? I think I'll be using Windows primarily, which is why I am considering making the partition only 100GB, or do you think I should just do it half-and-half?
I'm getting a computer built for me (yeah I'm not building my own, I actually found a better deal from a company that'll build it for me and they're giving me a lot of freebies including a fairly good air cooling system), and I'm worried that I'm going to run into problems because I've never installed an operating system before from scratch.
Firstly, my primary concern is physically installing the hard drives. I want to set my PC up in RAID 0+1, but right now, I only have two Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drives for RAID 0. I want to wait until I can afford two larger capacity hard drives to put them into RAID 1. Can I set this RAID configuration at a later time or do I have to install all the hard drives at the same time to accomplish RAID 0+1?
Secondly, I've never installed an operating system on a brand new computer before. From the main screen, would I go straight into BIOS to configure the RAID set-up, and if so, how do I do this so everything will be configured like I want? I'm planning on installing Windows 7 64-bit BETA operating system on this new PC, because the operating system is free right now, and I feel there's no point in spending $100 on Vista when 7 will be released soon enough. How can I go about installing Windows 7 64-bit OS? Will I have do download it and burn an ISO file onto a CD to install? I'm guessing if that's correct, from there I just follow the on-screen instructions?
Thirdly, being that I am going to be installing an operating system that is not currently stable, I'd like to install GRUB, so that I can also install and dual-boot into openSUSE Linux 64-bit OS until Windows 7 comes out of beta. It's kind of like my back-up plan in case something goes wrong with Windows 7 or if I get tired of it, or it gets released officially months and months after Windows 7 beta retires; I still want to be able to use my new PC.
Also, how will I go about installing the OS? Should I do it via partition or something?Finally, here comes the trouble that I'm anticipating: driver support. Will Windows 7 be able to work with my hardware, or will I have to update drivers somehow? I'm sure I'll receive some installation discs, but will they work with Windows 7? I don't want to have any hardware compatibility issues, with either Windows 7 or my Linux distro OS.
Lastly, I do have a few n00b questions, such as where do I install the HDD onto? The HDDs in RAID 1 right? Nothing gets written on the HDDs in RAID 0 right? I'm just confused about that... Also what HDDs should I make partitions on for my Linux OS, and how large should they be in GB (recommended)? I plan on having 2x 500GB HDDs in RAID 1...so that's not 1TB we're looking at, it's really 500GB of data. Should I make the partition 250GB, or 100GB? I think I'll be using Windows primarily, which is why I am considering making the partition only 100GB, or do you think I should just do it half-and-half?