Why get a mainbord with RAID if you arent going to use it? Makes no sense...I personally would NOT go with an unkown mobo or something that most DAW users are not using. Asus and Abit are the top two choices to go with. I'm not following you when you say that you arent going to use the RAID just seperate channels? RAID has several ways of working..you know that right? Do you need RAID? How many channels or tracks do you think you will be using? I always reccomend using the Primary controller for the OS and App drive..secondary controller for the Data drive..if you have SCSI or RAID..you can use that as well..obviously the 512MB RAM is good..going with Micron RAM is a good brand to go with. Just make sure that you read the manual for the motherboard if it has "specific" requirements on power and RAM types..some Tyan boards are very very specific about that stuff.
Dual booting...I'm not an advocate of that stuff..I personally wouldnt do that...but that's me..one partition will recognize the other in the registry...what video card are you going to get? make sure you have the display properties set to 16bit for the audio install..also try not to use a high intensive video RAM based card...32MB AGP card is the MOST you want. If you get a higher RAM intensive card you start taking performance away from audio on the video drawback time..
MOTU...I wish you luck and hop ethat the BETA drivers for Win2k are actually stable...
Opus

Originally posted by Opus2000:

one partition will recognize the other in the registry...

What the heck do you mean by that? I've dual booted for years, and NEVER had any problem with one OS recognizing the other registry!
Maybe trying to dual boot different win9x versions (It is a dain-bread OS).
I don't have problems sharing the file systems, either. In fact, if I put WINDOWSSYSTEM in my win2k path, I can run most win98 apps without installing them! Win2k was meant to dual boot. In fact, I dual boot now! And both run very happily side by side.(Actually, right now win2k is on scsi0 and win98 is on IDE0, and switch from the BIOS)

Perhaps you mean in the install process? If so, just run the windows setup from a dos boot disk with the argument /nr
which skips the registry check.

Don't do an 'upgrade' install whatever you do. Do a clean install of Win2k, and you'll be better off. and always install win9x first.

ljp

"I'm not following you when you say that you arent going to use the RAID just seperate channels?"

I should have been more concise on this. I have three hard drives and a cd burner which I want to setup without having to slave anything. So I need the extra IDE channels. Its also nice to have the option to go to raid 0 if the need arises. I record alot of 24bit audio tracks and use lots ofplug-ins so at some point in the future, the extra headroom might come in handy.

I've read alot of good reports on the Gigabyte board as opposed to any of the new Abits which I hear more complaints on than anything else. I also need to stay away from the KT133 chipset as MOTU cards are known to have issues with it.

Oh, and I'm running a dual boot now with WinMe and Win98LitePro. I use bootmagic which effectively "hides" the other partition that you don't want to boot from. The key is to install the two operating systems on seperate partitions.