Humberton Guard Guild Website

After teh PC drives died I have finally gotten around to buying 2 new Sata drives (it only had one in teh PC prev)...now whats the best (for best read easiest!) way to stick em in and install them - seem to remember reading something you have to do prior to install otherwise the full drive size doesnt register (on my last machine a 160gb drive showed up as 133gb or something)

Also this raid array or whatever it is....whats that all about then?

Will it be easiest to just whack em in, run the machine, install XP and forget about the tweaky bits?

im not sure but i think u have to install the raid driver for your mother board first m8.Then when you restart you should get an option to go into the raid selection thingie.

I would go for raid 0 meself as this places files on both drives in a stripe formation which makes access a bit quicker.

your motherboard manual should tell you which sata ports to plug them into and i think you have to enable it in bios.

Ah... that might be the problem I had last time / related to it - I have no clue where the manual is - mate originally built the machine and I have all the boxes etc but fear he didnt put the manual back in with it - he has no clue where it is either

Will remind myself later to check the model and see if I can find that info online

Cheers dude for the info to get me started

Like B says, you should get some option either in the BIOS or some other start-up menu that'll let you set up a raid 0 set.

Before you reinstall, make sure you have a raid driver for your motherboard on a floppy.
If you have the original CD that came with the mobo then it normally has a utility to create the disk, else you'll have to download it from the manufacturers website before you reinstall.

When you start installing windows you get an option to press one of the function keys (could be f6), if you need to install any 3rd party drivers so mash the key then.
Later in the installation it'll ask you to enter the disk so it can recognise your raid set and the 2 drives will show up as one big single drive you can install on.

Cool, that actualyy didnt read as blah blah too techie for me blah blah.. Hopefully will get around to having a go at it in the next couple of days - will update ye on here once I have give it a go

Thanks both

unless you have SP1 or above integrated in your xp install, it won't see the full drive size

Something I have noticed - 2 options for LAN drivers (at this point I have no clue even if I need LAN drivers but assuming I do!) one is just LAN the other Nforce4 - I remember my mate saying something about nforce4 but for the life of me cant remember if those are the ones I need or not

Drivers List

I also downloaded the Chipset driver as just the basic one, not the one with LAN n Sata Raid included - not sure if this was the right thing to do, or should I just download the whole shebang and stop worrying?!

Scroll down that list and download the SATA RAID driver, extract it to a floppy and when you reinstall windows you'll need it as a 3rd party driver disk.

Only problem with that - None of my machines have teh floppyness

Evzy wrote:Only problem with that - None of my machines have teh floppyness

That might be a problem, WinXP seems to assume that everyone has a floppy drive.

Can maybe borg one from an old machine, or if needed i think they're about a fiver to buy now.

Use Nlite to build own CD.


read http://roguishness.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... ght=#61646

When you click buttons. Click drivers as well.

Slip steam ya raid drivers in plus any others you might want to.

Burn disc and install

Hmmm I just re-installed XP sp2 on my system after a post-virus format and I use 2 hard discs, one acting as a slave drive but I never paid attention to this raid driver stuff.

Was I supposed to do something first before installing XP? I havent had to do a format since moving on from win 98 so assumed it was all just the same.

So far everything is working ok apart from having no sound, for some reason its not seeing the built in sound card.