Jump to content
  • 0

Dual-Boot (continued)


B00ze

Question

Good day Christopher.

Well, I've been delaying DrivePool for some time now (we last spoke in Feb 2016). I was trying my disks in an Intel RAID5 configuration. I love it, but I loose a whole disk of space (on a 3 disks RAID) and expanding the RAID is a bit complicated and there are recovery issues (disks are unreadable on anything but another system with Intel RAID on it). So I want to buy a license to DrivePool and try it out. But it is important that I be able to dual boot the pool without it re-measuring every time I switch OSes.

So I want to re-direct ProgramData\Drivepool to a shared folder, or keep 2 separate folders and sync them on shutdown, whatever works best. However, you once told me the data in there was encrypted. I really fail to see why you do this, but it doesn't matter, what matters is what you use to encrypt. If you encrypt with the license, and I can share the license file, then no issue. But if you encrypt with the license + OS version + whatever, or if I use 2 separate licenses, then it wont work.

Can you check maybe with Alex? If he says "absolutely not it will never work because of the encryption" then I won't bother trying it.

Thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

Honestly, there isn't a good way to do this. 

And anything I may recommend is 100% UNTESTED. 

That said, on the public beta/RC build, we've restructured how some of the settings work. You "MAY" be able to link the "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Store\Json" on each system together.  

 

10 hours ago, B00ze said:

However, you once told me the data in there was encrypted. I really fail to see why you do this,

Two reasons:  It contains licensing data.  ANd to prevent people from manually editing the settings in a way that could cause issues.

But we've changed a lot of it, and it doesn't encrypt the "JSON" stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Good day Christopher.

Well, good news - I can redirect/Share the ENTIRE ProgramData folder, at least with the evaluation license. It did not complain about anything at all when I switched to Win10 and installed the second copy (after having junction'ed the ProgramData StableBit folder). It's a lot of fun; I can do something in Win7, which generates a notification (top left button in the UI) then boot Win10 and the notification is there, telling me I changed duplication 10 minutes ago (on another OS!) Now the real test comes; will it work with a real license? Stay tuned. PS: Just in case, I gave both OSes the same PCNAME. If this works, add some comments in the encryption code, something like "remember not to use PC SID or something similar to encrypt because some people dual-boot" ;-)

Oh, and now that I've used the UI, I find the duplication pop-up pretty annoying. It's fine if you enable full pool duplication to have a kind of warning pop-up, but when you are playing with folder-level duplication, having a "Are you sure you want to duplicate" window pop-up every time you change a folder is pretty annoying. I understand it is asking also if I want to duplicate to more than 1 drive, and I'm not quite sure how to handle this better, but there is probably better way! The UI is nice. I would prefer a MMC snap-in to a custom UI, but it's not bad. I think you should make the "Manage Pool" words bigger, since this is where all the action is. Overall I do like the simplicity of it.

Thank you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

FYI - Works fine with a real license :-)

The hard part will be software updates. If I update DP on Win7 and you convert some data files to a new format, when I boot Win10 it will crash on the updated data. I think the best way will be to boot into one O/S, disable the Drivepool service, split the ProgramData folder, boot into the other O/S, upgrade the software, boot back into the first O/S, upgrade the software, then merge the ProgramData again and finally restart the Drivepool service. This should take care of ProgramData files changing format, and also of Alternate Data Streams changing format.

Regards,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...