Installing XP PRO to a 500 GIG RAID 0 ARRAY- HELP!

Hello,

I just built the following computer yesterday:

ASUS A8N-SLI DELUXE
ATHALON 4200 X2
(2x) WD 250 GIG DRIVES SATA II-3G with 16 MB CACHE (RAID 0)
ADDITIONAL SEAGATE 250 GIG IDE ATA DRIVE
RADEON X800 GTO
ULTRA X-FINITY 500 WATTS PS
LAN CHI FULL TOWE CASE
CREATIVE LIVE 5.1 PLATINUM SOUND CARD

It booted up no problems the first time. I was very happy.

But- I realized that my original WINDOWS XP PRO CD did not recognize the RAID 0 ARRAY that I built in the NVIDIA RAID set up bios menu, and I did not have the 3rd party RAID DRIVER on floppy disk, nor did it come with my motherboard. So- I installed to a spare 40 gig WD drive ATA IDE I had laying around- to get it to boot up- then I made a RAID DRIVER DISK from the support CD from my motherboard. I could not have used my laptop becuase it did not have a 1.44 drive to make the disk.

Now I want to install to my 500gig RAID 0 Array- but I do not have the SP2 Windows XP CD- I have the original XP PRO CD. Windows does not reckognize my drive's full size.

How can I install to a 466BG partition on my RAID 0 Array?

Is it possible?

What are my options?

Can I make a smaller partition on the RAID ARRAY, and make it into two hard drives?

Why does windows not reckgonize the full size of the drive?

The original releases of XP Home and Pro do not include 48-bit LBA support, therefore limiting your drive size to 137GB.

You can:

1. Create a smaller partition to store your Windows installation on (less than 137GB) and do nothing with the rest of the drive until after you have installed Windows and at least SP1, preferrably SP2. Then create a partition using the disk management plugin that contains the rest of the drive.

2. Get a copy of Windows that has at least SP1, then you can use the combined drive size as your partition.

3. Create a new Windows CD with SP2 slipstreamed in and install from that, using the combined drive size for a partition.

Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q303013 covers this exact issue

Hope this helps in some way!

Next time save yourself the $25 and do what's called a 'slipstream'.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showca [...] stream.asp

You could have used Linux instead which doesn't have this limitation.

COST?

$0.00

Linux is legally 100% free supports 48bit LBA, RAID arrays larger that 4TB and 64+GB of RAM

You need partition magic (proprietary/commercial software) or FIPS (free and open source).

Both allow you to move and resize partitions, etc however it can be a dangerous operation. Never do it without a good backup!

Set your Raid 0 up, just like the HD is only 137 gig. Leave the unused/formated area as is. Or as another NTSF.
Do a normal XP installation, remember to hit F5 to install the raid controller drivers.

Install your chip set drivers. CD that came with your MB. You may need this cd to put the raid drivers on a floppy disk.

Complete all of your hardware drivers.

Update XP with SP2 and all other patches.

Now use Partation magic to merger the unformated ot 2nd NTSF space with the curent 137gig.

If at all posiable hold off on the XP Activation till all is setup, it may force you to do it earlier.

Toms Hardware did a article about a year ago on how to slip stream XP SP1 to a SP2 CD. You may want to retrive it and make a SP2 CD. Then you want have to mess with Partition Magic.

Right now I am installed to an old spare 40 gig drive that is ATA100.

Is there an easy way to copy my hardrive to my raid drive after I have updated and installed everything?

The only way I know is use Norton Ghost 9 or 10. These newer version run from windows. You can just copy the 40gig drive to the 500 raid. What I don't know is How it will handle the raid drivers that is loaded before windows.

XP monitors hardware. The change or addition of the Raid may force you to call MS to keep XP running.

Well put!

Also since RAID 0 has no redundancy and with 2 drives there is 2x the chance one drive will break and you will lose ALL your data it is VERY important to have good backups of your system.

You should get a single large PATA or SATA HDD and backup your data to it on a regular basis because when 1 drive in your RAID 0 dies you WILL lose everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

RAID 0 is fast but it is not redundant or reliable

Good point but I also have a 250 gig ATA IDE drive, and two 80 gig USB 2.0 drives.... I would only want to keep stuff that is less than this amount of storage. I cool thing I usually do is copy everything to the spare 250 gi IDE drive, then when I install that into a new PC everything is still there. it is easier than trying to recreate raid stripes and partitions....!

I have an array with 300gigs of space.. and a 250gigs hdd ...and one 120gigs USB2 hdd..and 1 200gigs USB2.0 hdd... and 1 40 gigs USB2 hdd.. So, I know what "plenty of storage" means.. plenty of crap accumulated over the timeé

And I can tell you that backing up a full 300 gig for some reason could be a pain in the ass to do.. I did partition my array, giving 70gigs for OS and apps to install, and when it is time to reinstall, I'm happy not having too much to backup

fact is, once the partition is created, you don't have to repartition at each install.. you simply fast format the OS partition(+/- 10 seconds) and install the OS just like one big partition. All the other partition and stuff already on the drive remain unchanged..

That's what I would do. Installing the OS and apps on the same partition make sense since if you have to reinstall Windows, you'll likely have to reinstall all your apps anyway.

Ghost is probably the easiest way. I bet Linux_0 has some free alternative though!

You may also want to check out partimage and g4u:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/partimage/

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Good Luck!