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.