Can't get RAID to install on XP on a ICHR9 mobo

[Germz]

I'm building a rig for someone based on Abit IP35 Pro & e8400. They guy wants RAID 0, this is my first attempt at installing RAID and i ran into a problem. I did everything by the book (actually followed a RAID guide at hardwaresecrets): set drives to RAID mode in BIOS, set em up to RAID 0 in Intel stotage utility, d/l Intel 32-bit floppy config utility on another PC, formatted floppy drive and copied the extracted files onto floppy. Then booted from CD rom and pressed F6 when XP began loading, then pressed the "S" key when asked to install drivers, inserted driver floppy and selected ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R SATA RAID and then i get this message:

File iaStor.sys caused an unexpected error (4096) at 2113 in D:\xpsrtm\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.

I tried using different floppy disks, diffrent XP CDs, both with SP2 & SP3, different optical drives, an older storage driver version and i'm still getting the same error message. Only thing i can think of is that may be i didn't copy the Intel 32-bit floppy storage driver files on the floppy properly, i just formatted and used copy & paste, may there is some special way of copying RAID drivers onto floppy?

I did some googling around for the error 4096 and found this thread with the guy having the same problem as me, but he claims to fixed it by using newer drivers, i got the latest from 8/15/08. This is the thread:

http://www.motherboards.org/fo...viewtopic.php?p=693853

So you can see why i'm stuck, i tried everything aside from getting another floppy drive which i dont have so i'd appraciate some tips.

 

[COPOHawk]

I would try a few things:

1. Try configuring a RAID 1 array and see if you get the same result.
2. Try no RAID array and install Windows. Play with it and see if you get any paging errors in the Event Viewer.
3. Try RMA'ing the Mobo...could be a bad chipset out of the box.

Regardless, try to get this guy to understand why RAID 0 is a bad idea if the array goes south. If he really needs RAID...go RAID 1

HTH...

 

[Germz]

Thank you for your reply, however i resolved the problem on my own. Apparantly, as i suspected, it had to do with special copying of files to the floppy disk, they had to be extracted directly onto floppy as opposed to extracting them into the default download directory and then copying and pasting them to floppy. I arrived at this by simple trial and error which took me several hours. If that hadn't worked my next move wouldve been to install XP on a single disk like you suggested.

In regards to RAID 0, my friend is aware of the risks, however he does frequent backups of data so he is willing to live with the possibility of faiure of one of the HDDs in order to get incresed performance. As for myself, i agree with him and i'm planning to get RAID 0 soon as well with 2x 150GB or 2x 74GB (if they are ever out) Veloci. This was my first time setting up the array and glad that i gained this experince.