Installing Windows XP Pro w/ sp1 RAID config, help

[aricjonho]

I have recently purchased an a8n-sli motherboard. I have two seagate barracuda SATA 200gb hd's. I'm trying to install windows onto a raid setup with these hard drives(but to no avail), here's what I have done so far.

Enabled Raid in the BIOS, and enabled the SATA1 and SATA2 slots for RAID.

Created a RAID0 stripe setup using the (f10) menu screen array.

Set the striped array as bootable.

Booted from Windows XP Pro w/sp1 Installation CD

Hit F6 during loading screen for SCSI/RAID drivers

Inserted a disk I created with the appropriate(?) drivers.

Loaded appropriate(?) drivers.

Windows install fails to recognize any existing drives.



So, evidently my problem lies in the drivers I am loading. The Mobo manual has instructions for creating the floppy disk from the CD provided, but I guess the CD is slightly different. I browsed the CD for the silicon3114 64 raid drivers, and copied the appropriate 7 files.
These did not work.

I went online to the silicon website and downloaded their 3114 64-bit SATA raid drivers. None of these worked either(the si3114r5.sys file was corrupt? The older version worked and loaded, but still the hard drives were not recognized.)

I'm pretty positive the RAID setup was done correctly, as the 2 drives are listed as a single 376GB hard drive during some of the information posted during bootup.

Any suggestions? Maybe there are drivers that work?

Thanks for your help!

-Aric

 

[russell]

If the drives are working but not showing up in windows then they are probably seen as removable storage.

 

[nilness]

Haven't tried raid with XP yet but in my Win2K days what I would do is install Windows on one drive first. Then install the drivers. And then attach the 2nd drive and set to raid in bios (and let it do the raid setup thing).