How to add Software RAID 5 Support for Windows XP
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Microsoft Windows XP, by design, is not capable of a native software RAID5; however, capable of mirroring drives.
First you need to download free hex editor from here
* Copy the following files from the Windows sub directories to somewhere else, so you may edit them with a hex editor
system32\drivers\dmboot.sys
system32\dmconfig.dll
system32\dmadmin.exe
Make sure you keep backup copies in case it all goes something wrong
* Open the files in a hex editor and replace ‘SERVERNT’ or ’servernt’ to ‘WINNT’ or ‘winnt’ and vice versa (’WINNT’ replace through ‘SERVERNT’). Make sure that the length of the lines dont change. The difference in length between the string SERVERNT and WINNT must be filled up with spaces.
* Copy the three edited files to their original location. This you can do from the recovery console, but admins may do it immediately from Windows. Make sure the Windows XP CD isn’t in your drive. Ignore windows complaining about changed files which have to be replaced with the original ones.
copy dmboot.sys system32\drivers
copy dmboot.sys system32\dllcache
copy dmconfig.dll SYSTEM32
copy dmconfig.dll system32\dllcache
copy dmadmin.exe SYSTEM32
copy dmadmin.exe system32\dllcache
* Reboot the computer.
Now you can see similar to the following screen when you try to create RAID
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This doesn’t work for Windows XP. After replacing the files as above, there is no “create new volume” choice upon right clicking a dynamic disk under disk management.
This worked just fine for me on a clean copy of Win XP Pro sp2. I am using an 80 GB boot drive, and was able to setup 4 ~500 GB disks in a ~1.5TB RAID-5 configuration.
Thanks - pretty neat.
Has anyone tried this with SP3 yet? I can’t find the SERVERNT and WINNT strings in dmadmin.exe (though dmboot.sys is ok, and dmconfig.dll hasn’t changed)
Will I lose access to my existing RAID1 if I apply SP3?
@matt
You shouldn’t.Your RAID1 should work without any problem
Heres the deal I succesfully set this up…the only problem I have is everytime I reboot, I have to reintialize the disks. The array comes up no problem after that… Any ideas??