2TB Raid 0 Setup on XP

[joojooface]

Hi, I have two Western Digital 1TB hard drives and wanted to set them up in raid 0. I set up 2TB raid 0 in the bios of my ASUS M4A78T-E motherboard. So I tried to install XP on it and is said that it couldn't detect the hard drives. I did some searching and found that I need the drivers off of my motherboard cd on either an XP cd or a Floppy.

Thus, here's my problem. I have no floppy drives. And I'm on a Mac right now, so is there any way I can add the drivers to the XP cd through mac? And I also read that a usb drive is considered as a floppy so technically I can put the drivers on the usb and boot from the usb? I did not try this yet because I don't think the pc will allow me to search for drivers.

Thanks

 

[r_manic]

Well, the most straightforward solution is to buy/loan a USB floppy disk drive. Or you can try slipstreaming your RAID drivers to your Windows XP installer.

 

[sub mesa]

With XP you will have a misalignment, causing many RAID0 potential to be wasted. So you won't have much benefit im afraid besides higher sequential speeds.

To be honest, save yourself some headaches and use Windows Vista or Windows 7 and put the RAID drivers on a USB stick or CD-R, that won't work with XP but it will with vista and up.

 

[joojooface]

I managed to borrow a laptop to slipstream xp. I installed xp on my new machine and it works fine, minus the 200gb xp decided to use for recovery.

I am installing Windows 7 on it when it comes out, I bought the upgrade edition without realizing it. I guess I can survive a month in a half on xp.

As for the misalignment, would a defrag fix that?

 

[sub mesa]

No, the only easy way to avoid misalignment and use XP, is to boot with a Vista/Win7 disc and delete all partitions, then create a new one (NTFS) and quickformat, after this simply reset the system and install XP to the created partition.

By letting Vista/Windows 7 create the partition, it will create it starting at 1024KiB of your disc, while XP would start at 31.5KiB of your disc. XP would cause a misalignment issue which limits the performance benefit of RAID0 on Windows. That's also why i suggested Vista/W7 instead of XP but you can avoid the issue on XP with the method above.