HELP! Trying to install to a RAID 0 Array (500 GIG)

Mfusick

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Dec 29, 2005
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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?
 

bagg

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Jan 21, 2006
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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!