How do I install Win XP on raid without a floppy drive?

[gotsmack]

I think my floppy controller died. How do I install Win XP on my raid array without the floppy. I have the drivers.

 

[Dahak]

Unfortunelty you can only install the drivers from a floppy drive, becasue thats the only place it will look as far as i know. they should change it so you specify a path. Unless you can set a usb thumb/flash drive as a:

 

[gotsmack]

there has to be another way.

 

[Smilin]

Yeah there's another way but it's damn ugly. I can't give you the details but I can maybe point you in the right direction.

You're going to have to "pre-load" the drivers on either the hard drive or your Windows XP CDROM. Here's a Link to get you started. I don't think it has all the details but it's a start.

 

[Confused]

There was a thread about this in OS a couple of months back, and this is the post that I put in there 🙂

Hope it's of some use 🙂

Originally posted by: Confused
I have a solution for this. It's not too pretty, but it allows you to get past the text based portion of the setup without a floppy drive.

My RAID drivers came on a CD, and told me to copy them to a floppy. Of course I have no floppy, and so I finally found half a guide on the internet, and tweaked it to this, and this works 🙂


This is how I added my Silicon Image 680r ATA133 RAID Drivers to my Windows XP CD:

Copy the entire contents of the XP CD to a directory on your hard drive, for example C:\XP\

(This next step may not be necessary, I'm not sure)
Copy the TxtSetup.oem and PnP680r.sys and PnP680r.inf files (or just all the files that came on the driver CD, I am using PnP680r in my example because that's what my files are called) to C:\XP\I386\$OEM$\$$\DRIVERS\IDE
(End maybe unneccessary step)

Also copy the .sys file to C:\XP\I386

Open the TXTSETUP.oem file that came with your card with Wordpad

Open the TXTSETUP.SIF file in C:\XP\I386 with Wordpad

In TXTSETUP.SIF, search for [SourceDisksFiles] and add PnP680r.sys = 1,,,,,,_x,4,1 in this section

Search for PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3092&SUBSYS_00018086 = "i2omp" and add a line after it, using the same format, but using the information from the txtsetup.oem file.

Search for hpt3xx = hpt3xx.sys,4 and add the line PnP680r = PnP680r.sys,4 after it

Search for perc2gat = "Dell PERC 2/3 RAID Controller (Gatling)" and add the line that looks similar from your txtsetup.oem file. Otherwise, copy this line, and change the first bit to the name of your .sys file, and the 2nd bit to the name of the card.

Of course you will have to change everything to match the name of your .sys file 🙂


Then, you will need to burn all this back to a CD, and make the CD bootable. You can do this using Bart's Boot Image Extractor to pull the boot image from original Windows XP CD, then use that image as an image to make the CD bootable 🙂


This worked for me, to get me past the text based bit of the setup, and into Windows. Once there, install the RAID driver from the original CD, otherwise you'll have absolutely terrible IDE performance!!

Confused

 

[SUOrangeman]

The preceeding post is a keeper. Someone FAQ that guy!

-SUO

 

[Smilin]

I'll Second that.

Hey Mods, drop this in the FAQ.

 

[LED]

Put it on 1 IDE HD, then enable RAID in the BIOS, set it up, load the Drivers, then Ghost it over to the RAID Array.

 

[corkyg]

For less than $20 you can replace the floppy drive and go business as usual.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Uhh, cork. He stated that the controller may be the problem. That's not a drive replacement, that's a mobo replacement. Although, I think I've successfully used a USB floppy during such an installation.

-SUO

 

[McMadman]

What about one of those LS120 drives if you know someone that'd let you borrow one for a few mins?

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: McMadman
What about one of those LS120 drives if you know someone that'd let you borrow one for a few mins?

Yes - that will work. They run off the IDE controller and can be set to boot.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: LED
Put it on 1 IDE HD, then enable RAID in the BIOS, set it up, load the Drivers, then Ghost it over to the RAID Array.

that won't work if it's SATA RAID because ghost doesn't know what RAID is. I've been trying all day to get it to work for me

 

[LED]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: LED
Put it on 1 IDE HD, then enable RAID in the BIOS, set it up, load the Drivers, then Ghost it over to the RAID Array.

that won't work if it's SATA RAID because ghost doesn't know what RAID is. I've been trying all day to get it to work for me

That's funny cause that's how I did it on this NForce Abit with 2 Raptors in RAID0 off of an IDE WD 80 Gig SE which is now my backup Ghost drive.