how to raid 0

[sthreallyobscure]

Im going to get a gigabyte GA-8IRXP with onboard raid and have a go setting one up - but its first time ive tried raid so im full of questions.
My idea is to have just one hard disk (maxtor 740dx) in raid 0 and for this to be the bootable drive. No other hard disks in the system (for now).
Q1 is whether you can have a raid 0 array with just one disk?
Q2 is can you install windows (XP) on that disk and have it bootable even though the raid drivers wont be loaded until later?

I looked through the forums and found a reply to an earlier question on the same lines from Oakfan (thanks)

'When XP is loading it should ask you to press F6 (I think) if you have any 3rd party raid drivers. Then when XP loads it will prompt you to put in a floppy containing you raid drivers (you need to copy these to floppy from the soyo cd). Once you have loaded these drivers XP will see your raid setup.'

So my final question is whether i can get started or does anyone have any advice or know of any other difficulties i will encounter?

Cheers
Dave

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

The whole idea behind raid is to use multiple drives to span data across them , so no, you can't have raid on a single drive. You'll need at least 2 drives for raid. I run 2 30 gig maxtors (7200rpm) in mine in raid 0.

1. No
2. You install the raid drivers (press f6 when it says "do you have any external or scsi devices" or something like that) when installing xp. You just tell it to look on the floppy drive (with the dragon+ you had to copy the raid drivers from the driver cd to a floppy) and tada. XP will do everything else.

I have 0 problems installing my setup, mostly in part to reading the freakin' manual. It outlines everything step by step.

 

[sthreallyobscure]

ok granted qu1 is a novice one but the gigabyte manual is not absolutely clear
(quote)
NOTE: This motherboard permits striped arrays using 1,2 drives.

i just wondered what it meant by 1,2 drives ....?

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

The manuals are usually translated from whatever they speak in Taiwan (do they have their own language?). Some come out better than others, my Soyo was a breeze. Anyway, I have no clue what that means

What you'll probably have to do (this is what I had to do):

Put one drive on raid port 1, one drive on raid port 2 (assuming raid 0 or 1)
Set BIOS to boot from scsi/raid
hit a key to enter the raid array on reboot
define the array
reboot
boot from xp cd
hit f6 and load raid drivers
continue to install xp

You may want to give the folks over at AMDMB.com a shout. They have forums for each mobo maker. There should be tons of folks with the same questions/answers for your board. It's a great site for specific questions on a board, because you know that people reading that particular forum have it.

 

[sthreallyobscure]

cheers, i will check out the site