I have a pair of 250gb Serial ATA drives which I want to set up in a striped RAID array (I have another 160gb IDE drive for backup).
I’ve set up the BIOS to enable RAID (using NVIDIA RAID, hardware-based)
I’ve set up the drives to read as a single drive.
I formatted the drives, outside of Windows XP home setup (using Maxtor’s software, which sees a single drive with 500gb of space).
I start Windows set-up.
I press F6 and load both the Serial ATA drivers and the RAID drivers (two disks).
Set-up proceeds to the point where it asks where to install Windows XP. This is where my question starts.
Windows XP sees a single drive. That is good. It is unpartitioned. That shouldn’t be bad, but it is. Windows only wants to partition about 130gb of space, not the 250gb I want set up. That’s why I formatted my drive outside of Windows. It works on other drives larger than 130gb, so that windows setup sees them as their real size. It doesn’t however, want to work when I’m trying to set up a RAID array.
Am I doing something wrong? Hopefully the Teeming Millions can come to my rescue before I tread lightly into the ExtremeTech and/or AnandTech message boards.
Another question:
Can I create a partition of about 50gb and just install Windows there, then another partition of 200gb for all my storage, and have both in the striped RAID array? Is it considerable more difficult?
I tried to do EXACTLY what your describing. I could never get windows to see it as a partioned space. In the end I was forced to install windows to the drive I planned to use as a back up and use my striped SATA drives as a second non-bootable device.
For some reason windows XP just refuses to boot from a SATA raid array ( at least in my experince. )
Hmm, I’ve searched far and wide on the 'net as I’m sure you have done but didn’t manage to find much so far.
I have an ASUS motherboard K8N-E deluxe with native RAID and set it up as you’re trying to do. I had to enable SATA on the motherboard by finding the correct jumper.
I usezd FDISK to format my 160Gb drives to ‘see’ 320Gbin total.
The I changed the bios setup to boot firstly from SCSI (needed for SATA I was told?) followed by floppy and then CDROM.
I installed XP from a bootup floppy, not from CDROM bootup.
I didn’t get the floppy with the RAID drivers as you seem to have done. ASUS only provide a CD and you have to have a working system to make the RAID floppy from.
I heard that if you have K8N-E deluxe and a 64bit processer then the RAID drivers provided on the CD don’t work and you need to get new ones from Silicon Image.
Good luck with it anyhow !
Ponster, after considerable digging (good thing it looks like working), I came up with the root cause and 2 possible workarounds. The problem I’m having is that Windows XP cannot handle large drives (>130ish GB) without at least Service Pack 1. Unfortunately, my install disk in only Windows XP with no service packs.
The workarounds:
(1) Create a 50gb partition and install WinXP normally. Update to SP2. Windows should now see the full drive, and I can partition the remaining 200gb.