New System Setup

The last of my bits should be arriving courtesy of Citylink today so I'm hoping to have my PC built sometime this evening :)

The question is: After I've plugged it all together then what do I do? I've built a few systems but not with a RAID array (I'll be using RAID 0).

Do I need to do anything regarding RAID drivers before sticking the XP cd in? I'm dual booting but doing XP first. I won't have a floppy drive but have a USB pen which I saw somewhere someone mentioned making it bootable and usig it to install raid drivers?

Apart from that the rest should be fairly straight forward *touch wood*

You'll need a floppy drive (USB floppy drives are handy for this), a floppy disk, and the 'F6' RAID drivers, when you start up the XP install disc hit F6 when prompted, insert the floppy, select the driver, and continue the installation as per usual.

Nice thing about Vista is you can use other storage devices (like USB, CDROM, etc) for loading storage controller drivers.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Nice thing about Vista is you can use other storage devices (like USB, CDROM, etc) for loading storage controller drivers.

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So with XP is there any other way but using a floppy? Im putting a new system together soon so was just checking. Its sad how u got to whip out the old floppy these days to get such an advanced pc to work.

Sure, you can use nLite to intergrate Storage I/O drivers into the installation disk, that's the only other alternative. Unfortunately Intel doesn't have the good sense to distribute their RAID/AHCI drivers in zip format, they only provide a floppy image built into an image copying program, although Asus provide a better driver distribution, it may or may not have board specific stuff, but likely not to.

I've got the ASUS M2N32 so I'll rtfm and see if it says anything useful. I didn't think that! :mrgreen:

If I need a floppy disk though I may be out of luck as I'm sure I got rid a while back.

Yeah, then nLite is your next option. But you'd be screwed if you didn't have a machine to prepare the image.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Sure, you can use nLite to intergrate Storage I/O drivers into the installation disk, that's the only other alternative. Unfortunately Intel doesn't have the good sense to distribute their RAID/AHCI drivers in zip format, they only provide a floppy image built into an image copying program, although Asus provide a better driver distribution, it may or may not have board specific stuff, but likely not to.

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Right, sounds complicated:embarrassed: Ill stick to using the floppy. Its just a bit annoying really. Like u said the external floppy is a good one, at least then u can unplug it and put it away without it gettin damaged etc. So it will pick up a Usb floppy? usually it asks for A:, or do u just make the Usb floppy A:?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Yeah, then nLite is your next option. But you'd be screwed if you didn't have a machine to prepare the image.

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Luckily I have :mrgreen: I'll give the nLite route a whirl

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Originally Posted by Harkin

Right, sounds complicated:embarrassed: Ill stick to using the floppy. Its just a bit annoying really. Like u said the external floppy is a good one, at least then u can unplug it and put it away without it gettin damaged etc. So it will pick up a Usb floppy? usually it asks for A:, or do u just make the Usb floppy A:?

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As long as your BIOS has the good sense to treat a USB floppy drive as a floppy drive. Most do. nLite isn't really complicated, the interface is straight forward, the old way, fiddling with Windows install discs manually, now that was complicated, didn't enjoy it one bit.

With the Intel RAID controller you'll need to extract the drivers from the .exe file they provide. You could of course just install them onto a floppy on any old PC and then copy them across to the PC you're using nLite on (if not the same PC).

Failing that, you'll need WinImage to extract the files from the f6flpy32.exe (or f6flpy64.exe if you're going x64) file that Intel uses.

With Vista you can just copy those drivers (the .cat, .sys, .txt .oem and .inf files, not the .exe) to a USB stick or something (or even the partition on which XP is installed, as you're installing Vista afterwards) and point the installer to it when asked.

My asus board has EQ Raid or something, which allows you to set the RAID by hitting F2 on boot...

With it set as RAID0 or what ever in EQ i dont need the F6 Drivers :)

That's the best answer yet! :mrgreen: