You got a lot of work in this RAID project, I can tell your a man that never
sounds retreat.

XP is a pain in the ___ in many ways. It will try to insist that you use
NTFS. If you do that's great, but I don't. If you don't either, consider
finding a win98/ME start disk and a copy of FORMAT.EXE. From the FDD you
Fdisk the new array to one primary partition and format it. All before it
you even get to the XP CD. Any other drives should be disconnected.

The drivers install from F6 as usual. When XP gets around to offering to
partition the disk tell it to use what is has.

I would make very sure that the F6 driver is the correct driver. I assume
you looked on the web site for a new one.

My Raptors run circles around any PATA RAID I have installed. You will be
pleased with them.

JPS


"@drian" wrote in message
...
Recently as some may have read, I have been having trouble getting XP to
boot onto a RAID 0 array, using the onboard RAID controller on my Intel
D875PBZ motherboard (ICH5-R). I have two SATA Western Digital (WD) Raptor
36GB drives, hooked up to the Serial ATA ports of my motherboard.

I created the array from the Intel RAID BIOS then booted from the Windows
XP
CD. Pressed F6 to install the Intel RAID floppy drivers, XP would see the
array (67GB; 2 x 33.5GB), prompt me for partitioning information then copy
its files, at the end of which it would reboot.

(FYI: The boot order in the BIOS is set to the RAID array as the first
boot
device, followed by the CD drive I am booting from, with no other boot
devices specified after that.)

The PC would reboot then show a "A Disk Read Error Occurred, Press
Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart" message. I could never get past it. I *could*
install XP in a non-RAID single drive situation (even with the Intel RAID
controller enabled but without an array setup), but not in RAID.
Migrating
to RAID from a single drive would produce the same results.

As a last ditch effort, I bought an Adaptec 1210SA SATA RAID PCI
controller.
Hooked up the HDDs to the PCI card, disabled the Intel RAID controller,
created a RAID 0 array with the Adaptec card and followed the same path to
install XP as I did before.

This time, XP booted! It actually booted using the Adaptec PCI card, then
continued its install process. Yet, using the exact same procedure for
the
Intel RAID controller, XP refused to boot after the first part of the XP
installation.

My question is, has anyone ever heard of a RAID controller being
incompatible with certain make/model of HDDs? This is obviously the case,
otherwise the drives would fail under the Adaptec card. Yet, the Intel
RAID
controller worked fine with a pair of Seagate 120GB SATA drives I used to
have.

@drian.