I’m planning to use three 10,000 rpm Western Digital Rapters in RAID 5 for my dream PC that I’m getting ready to build. I want the quickest possible boot and load times from my hard drives but I also want some protection against data loss (bad experience with RAID 0). I also want to have tri-boot system (Linux, XP and eventually Vista) and am concerned that three partitions would reduce or eliminate the performance gains from my RAID array. Is this true? Any suggestions and advice would be much appreciated. (Storage and back up is provided by a 2Terabyte NAS so I don’t need a huge amount of local strorage)

Someone asked me about the best way to clean the data from used hard drives so that they can be re-used in new applications. He’s using the current version of Ubuntu. Suggestions on the best way to do this are welcome…. Thanks!

I accidentally installed Linux on my external hard drive. I got confused with my other 2 hard drives that I have internally to my pc. The thing now can’t be detected by Windows 7 or any other Windows version for that matter. I want to reformat the hard drive and maybe use it to store some files. Any suggestions on how to make that possible?

I boot Mandriva Linux from a DVD but I cannot modify the content of my hard drives…
(I dont have permissions)
What can I do? I cannot install Linux on my HD…
thanx.