Can someone help a RAID newbie please :)

[duckdown]

Hi all

I just built a brand new C2D rig, its using the eVGA 650i Ultra motherboard, and I have 2 SATA drives hooked up to it..

However I am having a problem now when I am trying to install XP onto the RAID setup.. I have never done raid before, but what I did was enable RAID in BIOS for the appropriate drives, then entered the RAID MENU at bootup time by pressing F10. I chose mode STRIPING (Dangerous I know) and added the two drives to it, created the array and set the BOOT OPTION to YES.

But then when I inserted my XP CD to go ahead and install Windows, it said that it couldn't find any hard drives

So I went and disabled the RAID and just wanted to see if it could detect my SATA drives at all, and without the RAID enabled it installed just fine!

Can someone PLEASE tell me what is going on.. I don't think it needs me to press F6 and supply drivers at install time because the motherboard didn't come with any, and when the drives aren't RAIDed it installs just fine.

Please help a newbie!!! Thanks!!

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: duckdown
I don't think it needs me to press F6 and supply drivers at install time because the motherboard didn't come with any, and when the drives aren't RAIDed it installs just fine.

That's exactly what you need to do -- Windows has no way to recognize the RAID array without drivers, so you must supply them during OS installation, which is done using a key press and floppy or by creating a custom OS installation incorporating the drivers, e.g. using nLite.

You might be able to find a utility for writing the drivers on a floppy on the CD somewhere. Alternatively, since you have an OS running, you should be able to download and extract them from an nVIDIA installation.

You can find documentation here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_raid.html

 

[Stumps]

you need to press F6 and supply the correct drivers on a 1.44mb floppy in order to get a bootable raid array working in windows XP.

you need to download the Nvidia drivers for your motherboard and copy the RAID drivers to a floppy.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nf_650i_winxp32_8.43.html