Raid card will not boot up.

[Neyd3400]

I was hoping for a little advice. I got a raid card (silicon graphics) by syba, it was very inexpensive, I was able to get the card booted up in bio and stripe to 30 gb WD caviars, but I couldn't get windows xp to to find the driver. I did not have a floppy drive and Windows refused to look for the driver anywhere accept an A: drive, which I did not have. The card came with a small cd rom with the driver on it. After 5 or 6 boots and attempts to install windows and the card ceased to boot up. I went and bought a floppy and attempted to install the driver. The windows accepted the driver nicely after, but windows didn't see the raid. I am assuming that the card is not booting up and this is why I couldn't install windows on the two drives. I've used raid with my old abit kt7a-raid and I never had a problem with an install. What do you think, do I have a bad board or could my motherboard be the problem. I attempted different pci slots with no luck. I don't have a second computer to test the card on another board. I could try my brothers later next month, but that a long time.

 

[Jiggz]

I'm assuming you already did the following:
Connected the hdd's on each of the raid card channel and jumpered as masters.
Upon boot up, when prompted by the controller bios, pressed F4 or other keys required to configure the raid controller either raid 0, or 1, and configured as a bootable array (usually by just pressing the space bar indicated by a diamond on the array)
Pressed F6 to install the raid driver during windows installation and windows installed the driver from the floppy drive.
When prompted by Windows, you should have partitioned the hdd's (showing as one drive) and formatted.

If you have done all of these, then all basically all you need is to finally install Windows.😎