RAID 0 - New Install

achitophel · 8 Nov 2006 at 11:12

Hi

Have just splashed out for two 150Gb Raptors and I intend to run them in RAID 0 (Yes, I have checked the rated performance gains and know that they're relatively marginal, but, what the hell, it'll be fun!). The Mobo is a Asus P5W DH.

What I'm really struggling with is to find a halfway complete guide to setting up a RAID logical drive. The idea is that it'll be my main OS partition, so am wondering how I go about installing the RAID controller drivers etc etc.

Does anyone know of a good basic installation guide which will set me on the right path?

Have seen references to people saying a floppy is needed - if poss, would prefer to burn the files to a CD and run them from there to avoid having to cannibalise a floppy from another machine.

All help gratefully received

Cacker · 8 Nov 2006 at 11:41

Hi,

Well, I setup to maxtors as RAID 0 on my Abit AN7 (Sil 3112 controller). It was fairly simple.

All the steps I had to do, including obvious ones

1) In BIOS I had to enable the SATA controller (I generally disable unused hardware)

2) In BIOS I *think* i enabled Enabled booting from SATA.

3) In BIOS, make sure the boot order has the CD-ROM *before* the Hard disk, as I am guessing you will be installed the OS from a bootable disk

4) A reboot with SATA enabled gives you the option to go into SATA menu. This is where you create your RAID pair and choose RAID 0 or 1 etc.

5) Now boot up with your bootable windows disk

6) It will ask if you have any third party drivers, which you do, so you hit F6. It will at some point then ask for the aforementioned disk, for which you should have supplied with the motherboard, a floppy. It will show a menu of drivers to select, as the disk may contain more than one. Having looked at your mobo manual, you should be able to select the right one. With this driver, windows can access your SATA RAID 0 disks as one logical drive. After that, windows install is as normal. Create at least one partition for the OS to install on (depends on how you are going to configure it), the other partitions (if you plan to have more) you can create in Adminstrative Tools -> Computer Managegement-> Disk Management

Basically, ONCE you've set up the two disks as a raided pair in the SATA menu, Windows etc will just see one disk. You can then partition and format as you wish.

I *think* thats all.

Note: you could use a CD, but as i said, there *should* be a SATA driver floppy that came with your mobo. I guess, you could just temporarily swap the M$ cd for the driver CD, but i haven't tried that.

achitophel · 8 Nov 2006 at 11:53

Thanks a million for that - that was exactly what I was looking for

One last question, is it possible to swap out the Win XP installation disk for another CD, assuming I burn the drivers on that disk. I'd like to avoid hooking up a floppy to the new PC if at all possible.

Cheers again for the help

Cacker · 8 Nov 2006 at 12:03

you *should* be able to, on the theory that Windows Setup shouldn't need access to both CDs at the same time.

I've just got this funny feeling that you do *not* get the option to say where your drivers are, ie, it *only* checks the floppy drive.

I just googled for some screenshots, found one in spanish/portugues ^^, but it looks like it *only* checks floppy drive A:

rpstewart · 8 Nov 2006 at 13:02

You're translation is correct - Windows can only load storage controller drivers from a floppy. Why is anybody's guess.

achitophel · 8 Nov 2006 at 13:17

Oh bugger

That's some more dismantling to do then.

Well thanks a million for all of that anyway.

P.S. for mods - I do think it might be worht stickying the main post here as this isn't info I was able to find easily either on the forum or elsewhere (oddly enough, lots of references to NVidia chipset mobo RAID install guides, but little else)

achitophel · 13 Nov 2006 at 11:38

By way of update, my Asus mobo (P5W DH Deluxe) seemed to have the RAID 0 drivers pre-installed (via BIOS?), since when I used the designated RAID SATA ports and set the jumper for RAID 0, the BIOS then saw the drives as a single logical partition before I began the Win XP install.

raitasar · 13 Nov 2006 at 14:53

Have a look here. P5w DH Deluxe .

Scroll down to "Ez-backup" and have a read. Your motherboard supports this asus toy that means all you have to do is plug both drives into the two sata slots marked "ez backup" on the motherboard, (they're at the far bottom) and set a jumper from the default of raid 1 to raid 0.
That's it.

The location of the jumper can be found in the manual.