Yesterday I took delivery of Windows Vista Ultimate with plans on dual-booting the 64-bit Vista with XP Pro. I had a few issues here and there with things like the boot loader and with the extra 2 GB of RAM I also bought and hoped to put in the machine.During installation/configuration, I started digging around my machine and just thought that it might be time to strike it all and start over with a clean installation of everything, including XP and Vista. Maybe then I can rework my overclock to be more efficient (if possible) and have a clean slate from which to work. Maybe I can also get that stupid boot loader and the extra 2 gigs of RAM to work without as much headache as it gave me yesterday.I'm looking for a little advice on how to set up the drives. First, my specs, at default:E66004GB RAM (if I can get the extra two to work, that is)EVGA 8800GTX times 2 in SLICustom watercooling (which got me to 3.6 on the E6600)2 - 150GB Raptors1 - 500GB Seagate (7200)2 - 300GB Maxtors (7200 - only using one right now - Vista Ultimate installed)Right now I've got the Raptors configured in RAID0 with XP installed as the OS and pretty much just FSX and FS9 also on that drive, with various add-ons. The 500GB is the drive I use for storage as well as installation of non-MSFS games/software. The 300GB Maxtors I got for super-cheap and they don't have a use yet, although I did install Vista on one of them.So what shall I do? I'm considering the following:1 - 150GB Raptor with two 75 GB partitions for the XP and Vista, or perhaps a 50GB for XP and a 100GB for Vista, whatever1 - 150GB Raptor for FSX exclusively1 - 500GB Seagate for everything else, including FS9Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice? Any would be much appreciated.

What Motherboard? (purely for interest)I have a similar system:EVGA 680i MotherboardX6800 OC'd to 3.466GHz2GB 1066Mhz OCZ RAM2 x EVGA 8800GTX3 x WD 500GB SATA No1: XP Pro, FS9, FSX No2: Vista(Business Edition), FSX No3: Data storage (Backup)Haven't bothered with RAID..so can't be much help there.I've hardly ever booted up into Vista... waiting for DX10!!Have used it for Multi-monitor setups ..but currently have a single 24"W connectd so am running in SLi mode.Don't know that this helps you decide how to set yours up but I'd be inclined to try running the Raptors as you suggest..unless someone has empirical evidence that a RAID configuration would be faster???RegardsJim

Asus Striker Extreme. Built most of this system about 8 months or so ago and have been tweaking it ever since. It's kinda messy now though.

>So what shall I do? I'm considering the following:>>1 - 150GB Raptor with two 75 GB partitions for the XP and>Vista, or perhaps a 50GB for XP and a 100GB for Vista,>whatever>>1 - 150GB Raptor for FSX exclusively>>1 - 500GB Seagate for everything else, including FS9>>Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice? Any would be much>appreciated.Your thoughts are pretty much on the money. Having FSX on a dedicated drive and your OS on another drive will defintely help in performance. ATM I'm dual booting with Vista 32 Ultimate and XP Pro with the OS's residing on one Raptor with two 75GB partitions. One of these days when I get the gumption I'll give Vista 64 a go. ATM though I'm happy with the way FSX is runnning under Vista 32.

Pretty much what I did except I think the 4G ram is unnecessary and may even cause a problem w/XP. Seem to recall that XP had issues with *certain* configs using 4G ram. You might want to research that.I dual boot XP/Vista on a 320G drive and have FSX residing on a RAID0 with a 500G drive for backups - works like a champ!Install XP first from it's CD *then* install Vista from it's cd - after that the dual boot will be no issue. Do it the other way around and it gets tricky.It's been well over a month now and I've had no issues with dual booting or running FSX.It gets a bit tricky initially installing FSX if you plan on running it under either OS - I installed it to it's own drive under XP and then reinstalled it to the same drive under Vista just to keep the registry entries correct. Ditto with certain add-ons, etc. No problems.Good luck,VicQ6600 G0 CPU 2.4 o/c 3.6Evga 680i A1 with P30 BIOS 2G XP2-8500 DDR2 1066FSB Mushkin 996535 RAM 5-5-4-12-2T320G 7200 HD partitioined for XP/Vista/Programs 2 - 74G Raptors in RAID0 500G 7200 HD for backup SATA DVD burner Evga 8800GTS 640 PCIx Kandalf LCS case w/ built in liquid cooling 850W Thermaltake power supplyVisit the Virtual Pilot's Centerwww.flightadventures.comRadar Contact Supporter: http://www.jdtllc.com/

This would be my thought:1 150 raptor 30Gb WinXP and dual boot loader---120Gb Win XP programs. (I do not load anything intomy OS partition, unless I am forced to, except my documents&settings (%appdata%)).1 150 raptor 50 Gb vista---100Gb Vista programs. Same caveat.1 500 seagate -- for all data, including "my documents".1 300 Maxtor -- buy an enternal enclosure and use as backupdevice.I can see a possible advantage of having FSX on a different drive, but unless someone shows me some hard data I'm kind of a skeptic that doing it will have a measurable effect on how it runs. Same kind of thing with RAID0. I don't worry that much about HD failure, but it's a hassle if you have to move the drives later to a different machine, or if you want to boot off a usb or cd.scott s..

>This would be my thought:>>1 150 raptor 30Gb WinXP and dual boot loader>---120Gb Win XP programs. (I do not load anything into>my OS partition, unless I am forced to, except my >documents&settings (%appdata%)).>>1 150 raptor 50 Gb vista>---100Gb Vista programs. Same caveat.>>1 500 seagate -- for all data, including "my documents".>>1 300 Maxtor -- buy an enternal enclosure and use as backup>device.>>I can see a possible advantage of having FSX on a different>drive, but unless someone shows me some hard data I'm kind of>a skeptic that doing it will have a measurable effect on how>it runs. Same kind of thing with RAID0. I don't worry that>much about HD failure, but it's a hassle if you have to move>the drives later to a different machine, or if you want to>boot off a usb or cd.>>scott s.>.>Partioning a drive and putting the OS in one partition and programs in another partion will do nothing but decrease your performance. You would be better off with one partition for both the OS and programs. The drive that occupies the outter most partition will perform faster than the drive drive on the inner most partition. So if for instance you partition a drive into C: and D: with the OS on C: and programs on D: you are inherently inducing a performance decrease to your programs by forcing them to your inner drive cylinders. The more partitions your create on a drive the greater the performance decrease on the inner most partitions.

I appreciate all the suggestions. So far, here's how I decided to do it:one 150GB Raptor - 2 partitions of 75GB each. XP and Vista Ultimate installed. Haven't decided exactly what to do with the extra space, but FS9 may very well end up on the extra XP space.second 150GB Raptor - FSX installed via Vistaone 400GB Seagate - (not a 500, as I thought), other programs and misc. storage.one 300GB Maxtor - haven't decided if I'm gonna use it in this PC or elsewhere, but I'm leaning toward using it in some fashion.4GB RAM almost works, but I'm still getting the occasional BSOD. That's better than not being able to even boot into Windows, which is the issue that I had originally, so we're getting there.I have yet to install any add-ons. I had been running FSGenesis mesh and landclass over the entire world, but I'm thinking of using Ultimate Terrain X, at least for the USA. I've also got the Carenado Cessna 206 full package, the LDS-767, the ASX bundle with AGX, and a couple other things that I can't remember at the moment.First I have to call Microsoft to activate FSX. :-madSo that's where I am right now. I haven't yet started the overclocking yet, so I'm still at 2.4GHz for the E6600.