SATA-RAID Install

Hi and welcome go Geeks to Go. Yes, you do have the correct understanding. You need to put the SATA drivers on a floppy disk. During windows install, you will be prompted to install 3rd party drivers by pressing F6. At that point, press f6 and insert the floppy into drive a and load the drivers.

Here is a good link for information on SATA, a tutorial
http://www.omnicast....build/SATA.html

I finally got it working but it was a hassle all the way. I spent many many hours getting this new build to work. The BIOS controller is not intuitive at all and can be easily missed on the booting screen. Abit's RAID drivers are on a CD but cannot be accessed on the main menu on another machine if it doen't have the same chipset (Via vs. Nvidia). Had to quess which were the right drivers by browsing the CD. Windows XP did not want to load. It would get almost loaded and then the blue error screen. Clearing the CMOS a few times seems to have fixed that.

I woulld not build another SATA-RAID machine and I would not recommend any one to try it unless they really need a challange or want to use it as a learning tool.

Well bit daft doing raid as the windows booting drives. raid0 is best if you have three drives, one for windows and the program files and the other two as your raid0 for data set up in windows. And if one drive fails you will have lost all the data on the two drives.

Well, I thought I had it working. It did for a short while but it became more and more unstable that it wouldn't boot up WinXP or recognize the hard drives. Previously, I had to replace or substitute every component in the system except the motherboard to get it going. I now have another mobo, same model to install to see if it will ever work. I have built several different systems before this and never had a problem but this is my first SATA-RAID build (and probably my last). Will keep forum advised.

System:
Abit VA-20 micro mobo
Maxtor 60gb HDD's (2)
Kingston 512K memory
Aspire 420W psu (came with case)
X-Qpack Aspire case
Mitsume FDD and card reader combo
Emprex 16X DVD burner
PNY VERTO 5200 video card

Edited by John V, 11 August 2005 - 01:21 PM.

The motherboard was defective. Replaced it with an exact duplicate and now WinXP Pro and SATA-RAID are working fine.