Am I going to have trouble installing Windows XP onto brand new RAID?

[Sanborn]

Hey guys, for my new puter I bought two of those Barracuda 7200.10 drives to put in Raid 0. The first time they will be used is when I power up that new C2D machine......

I've been hearing things about ppl not getting SATA Raid to recognize under XP and other small horror stories. Are there things I need to do in advance to mkae sure I am not jumping off my roof when I attempt to install XP on them in RAID for the 1st time???

OH and if it matters, I've already got a program and slipstreamed SP2 into XP.

[RyderOCZ]

You will need the raid driver disk that came with the mobo....you just put it in the floppy and press F6 at the very beginning of the install.

Then point it at the correct driver when it asks you.

[Sanborn]

Bah floppies, do newer motherboards have built in RAID?

[RyderOCZ]

Yes, I assume that is what you will be running your Raid0 on?

The raid controller is built on the southbridge, plus there may be a secondary raid controller.

Either one you use you will need drivers, even if you run a PCI raid card.

XP is not going to natively find a raid array except on certain compaq, hp, etc business/server type machines.

[[XC] itznfb]

Bah floppies, do newer motherboards have built in RAID?

what?

step1> enable raid controller in bios
step2> enable sata ports in bios (if required)
step3> reboot > enter raid config
step4> configure array
step5> change boot priority in bios CD>ARRAY>FLOPPY
step6> install windows, on the first screen hit F6 as ryder said. you'll need the floppies that came with the motherboard containg the raid drivers

[Sanborn]

Ok, I will just make sure to buy a floppy (I seriously don't own one) with my new puter. Are they about $2 now haha.

[[XC] itznfb]

manufacturers need so stop shipping drivers on floppies if they want to phase them out. or atleast ship them on CD as well as floppy.

[Serra]

There are also programs you can get to allow you to create CDs to use instead of floppies, but they're annoyingly hard to find. I can't think of any specific ones off the top of my head (because I have a floppy drive), but someone else here might.

[Sanborn]

ok sounds good. I'm hoping within 5 years that IDE,AGP, PCI have completely died off.

[nn_step]

You should have NO problems. if you do, just install one drive test it and repeat to make sure all drives work perfectly.

[[XC] itznfb]

There are also programs you can get to allow you to create CDs to use instead of floppies, but they're annoyingly hard to find. I can't think of any specific ones off the top of my head (because I have a floppy drive), but someone else here might.

floppy emulation on CDs don't work for windows installations either. the only windows OS i've found that it works on is 2003R2