3 500GB seagate HD's in Raid 0?

Hi guys
I new to this stuff but I just bought 3 new Seagate 500 GB hard drives. I want to set up a raid array for my system. I have no problem with setting up the array in the bios. My problem is the copy of vista I have is an upgrade so i need to install XP first then upgrade it to vista. I have not used my floppy drive in 5 years and when i tried to make the driver disk it did not work.
Is there any other option for this? I read somewhere that I can use the vista disk to format the drive and create a partition then restart and install XP on that partition(the raid array). I am at work right now can not try this till I get home. Will that actually work? Or do I need to suck it up and buy a new floppy on my way home.
I will be using a 1 TB external eSATA drive for daily back ups so not too worried about the potential data loss. I installed vista without a registry key last night, seems to be working fine but need to redo the whole thing tonight.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Sounds like a great idea. I have never used disk imaging before so did not think of it.
How do I restore the disk image onto the formated drive? do I need to run an OS on a separate drive?