RAID virgin requires assistance!

[UTmaniac]

I finally put together my new rig yesterday,as per sig. However, I came unstuck when trying to set up my 2x WD 3200AAKS in RAID 0...

I created a RAID volume in the RAID bios, but when Vista64 invited me to load a RAID driver, the one supplied on the motherboard's driver CD was not recognised (I had read that Vista does not depend upon a floppy for the RAID driver and that it can also read CD/DVD and USB... Shame a suitable format besides a floppy installer was not on the disk).

I then rescued a floppy drive from an old system, along with an old 1.44MB floppy disk, both of which seemed so archaic (having not used either for several years). I managed to get the floppy formatted, but when I tried to run the RAID floppy installer, it refused to install (complaining of head/sector errors).

So I ended up installing Vista64 in a non-RAID environment, in a 30000MB partition, while a 60000MB partition was created on the same HDD for games. It runs fine, but I would like to set up a RAID 0...

The motherboard drivers CD has an Intel Matrix file, in the same folder as the floppy driver installer. Could I use this to convert my new Vista installation into RAID 0, or do I need to borrow/buy a new floppy drive and disk to start over at some point (after gettting a gaming fix following a drought of a few weeks?

Thanks in advance for knowledge given by gurus

 

[gary996]

Ive never managed to use any thing but a floppy to set raid up. Its about time floppy's just die and the manufacturers make it easier to use flash drives

 

[rpstewart]

The Vista setup will take drivers off a flash drive or a CD fine. As long as the hardware manufacturers supply driver CDs with the files in an uncompressed state and in a sensible directory structure then that's all you need.

However that's not always the case. For example my old Asus board which doesn't have Vista drivers has everything nicely laid out (shame XP can't deal with a CD). On the other hand my BadAxe2 has all the Vista drivers nicely compressed up so the installer can't read them...

 

[1kiwi]

OP: I had a similar problem to you when attempting to get XP to work with AHCI. Like RAID, it requires drivers.

I didn't have a floppy and flash never works so what i did was use a prgram called nlite to 'inject' the intel AHCI drivers into the XP startup CD. It's strange that Vista is not working because from my understanding, RAID drivers are included. Anyways, i assume you should be able to use nlite to fix your problem. Worked for me.