How do I format two RAID 0 80G WD hard drives?

[Moonbeam]

I'm trying to figure out how to do raid 0 on a SY-k7V Dragon Plus and wrom what I gather I have to set the COMS to boot SCSI first, set the jumpers on the motherboard to RAID, install the drives, jumpered, I think as Single rather tnan Master, connect them to the yellow raid-ide controller, follow the instructions for creating a performance raid, fdisk and format the disk, install the fasttrak drivers and install XP.

I haven't tried it yet but fdisk and format are slow, whereas the format disk that comes with the disk is almost instant. Also, I'm reading that fdisk has a 64 G max problem according to what I've been reading. Anybody done this that can offer advise? Thanks.

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Please consolidate your hard drive questions into a single thread. Right now you have three of them that are active.

AnandTech Moderator

 

[John]

[*]Jumper each HDD as master.
[*]Connect each HDD to its OWN 40 pin/80 wire cable (blue or colored end to mobo, black to the HDD).
[*]Boot into your cmos and set boot sequence to floppy, cdrom, scsi or raid.
[*]Save changes and reboot.
[*]Boot into the raid bios and setup the array and stripe size of your choice (usually 64K is a good starting point).
[*]Save changes and reboot.
[*]The Win XP cdrom is bootable, and you should see a message to hit F6 to install scsi or raid drivers..do so and you will be prompted to insert the floppy with the drivers within a minute or two.
[*]Setup will continue so you can partition and format (in your case ntfs will be the only option) the array, then it will copy files.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'll get started on that John, thanks. After save changes and reboot you said boot into the raid bios. How do I do that? Will I boot into it automatic when I reboot with no cd, or floppy? Sorry

 

[LED]

John stated all the bytes you'll need

After save changes and reboot you said boot into the raid bios. How do I do that?

Highpoint is usually Ctrl+H
Promise is usually Ctrl+R

Eitherway it should LYK right B4 identifying the RAID HD's setup by 1 message

 

[Moonbeam]

I'll give it a go. Thanks.

 

[John]

Did you figure it out yet?

 

[Moonbeam]

John, I'm getting there. Apparently setting Western Digital drives to master doesn't work. I set them to master and no drives were found. I was told to use single which I did and that worked. I'm surpoised that made a difference but unless I accidentally fixed a power pluf loose connection in the process, that fixed my no drives found problem. I just came back to reread your directions. Got a suggestion to download and install service pack 1 with XP right off the bat, but think I'll try the regular way. Have to format now.