Windows XP, RAID, and HAL Upgrades

[rbanerji]

I have an ASUS P4P800E motherboard running Windows XP and the Promise RAID controller running a Raid 0 with two drives striped etc.

In my device manager when I look at computer it says Standard PC. I need to set that to ACPI. So I look up the MS web site and find article ID 299340 which shows how a HAL upgrade can be done. And here is my problem.

To do a HAL upgrade when asked to press F6to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver, you need to press F5. Then you will be presented with a list of HAL options and you select one etc.

But since I have a third party RAID driver then when I press F5, after selecting the HAL I attempt to continue to install Windows and I get an error saying no hard drive was found. If I hit F6 and give it the floppy for the Promise RAID driver then I never get the chance to hit F5 and select the HAL.

So just how am I to upgrade the HAL? Any ideas?

 

[rbanerji]

Oh well, I figured it out. So here goes, and keep this in mind if you are building you own PC.

First let me address how I fixed my problem. I hit F6, provided the floppy for the RAID driver and let Windows do a repair install. It automatically detected the correct HAL so I did not need to use the F5 forced HAL upgrade option.

How did I get into this situation in the first place? Well, you would think that if you buy a new model Motherboard from a reputable company (ASUS) they would sell it to you with a reasonably new bios. Nope. Wrong, Wrong Wrong.

When you are building a machine, make sure you update your BIOS prior to your Windows installation (dont ask me how). Otherwise Windows will pickup information based on the old BIOS and will load drivers accordingly and will build the wrong HAL. Exactly what happened in my case, where Windows thought I had a Standard PC instead of an ACPI Multiprocessor PC (or a chip with HyperThreading). After isntalling Windows I aupdated my BIOS, but now there was no way to tell Windows XP to load a new HAL outside of reinstalling.