help with setting up raid

[XxervioCSO]

i need little help setting up my raid. i have an Iwill kk400-rs and my raid array is setup with 2 western digital drives the same model. one is set to master the other is set to slave. it combines the size of both drives so it reads one. it shows up in my computer. i'm running Windows Xp pro. now is the part i am a little lost. how do i install windows to the drives to get the raid running. it won't let me install using the Winxp CD cause i guess HPT371 raid drivers are 3rd party and i don't use a floppy drive to install them. how else do i go about installing Winxp to the drives??

thankz

 

[SickBeast]

first of all you should have each hard drive set as the master...otherwise raid is almost pointless.

you MUST use the floppy with the drivers for your raid controller (you might be able to use a cd as well, but i've never tried it). you need to hit F8 as soon as the blue screen comes up (it will prompt you).

be careful with raid-0 as it can seriously cause data corruption. i lost 80gb of data because of it. good luck.

 

[XxervioCSO]

damn that stinks i don't have a Floppy drive around hehe. also i did put both drives as master, but when i booted up the raid bios before windows started only showed one drive as the primary master. is that how it is supposed to read?

 

[XxervioCSO]

could i format my other hard drive and install the basic Winxp with nothing else installed then copy that drive to the raid drive and then work from there or would that screw things up??

 

[SickBeast]

that wouldn't work because you would need the raid drivers....actually, it MIGHT work...it's not an ideal way to do it tho.

try using a driver cd instead of the floppy...

how could you not have a floppy drive? personally, i would just go out and buy one, they're still moderately useful for boot disks and such.

 

[ozone13]

Originally posted by: XxervioCSO
damn that stinks i don't have a Floppy drive around hehe. also i did put both drives as master, but when i booted up the raid bios before windows started only showed one drive as the primary master. is that how it is supposed to read?

Did you also put both drives on seperate ide cables? You can't have two masters on one ide cable.

 

[XxervioCSO]

there is no way i can run 2 ide cables, the raid is built in on the motherboard and there is only one channel for IDE raid. so in this case having both as master i don't think works. I think i will reinstall windows from scratch on the 40 gig and drive image it over to the Raid drive. only question i have now is since i am running a stripping raid array, would windows read both drives and combine them so i would get a total of 160gigs or should it read one drive and post 80gigs? cause as of right now it is posting both drives. It's an Iwill kk400-RS