RAID drive

[themoid]

Hi fellas,

Just got my PC back from MESH - one power cut blew the motherboard, PSU and hard drive. All replaced under warranty

Problem is they have put XP home on, and I need to install XP pro. Having problem doing a clean install because the new hard drive is RAID format and isn't coming up on booting from the XP disc.

I have no idea what RAID is, what it means etc, and how I can install Xp pro on to it. I have seen that when booting from the disc it asks you to press F6 to install raid drivers, but i dont know what drivers it is asking me to install (doh) - are these motherboard drivers, hard drive drivers.

Anyone give me some info or point me to a good resource ?

Cheers

Stu

[loonatic]

You will need to get the drivers for the RAID controller onto a floppy disk and press F6 during the initial phase of the XP installation for the RAID array to be visible.

You should find the drivers on the drivers CD that came with the motherboard or you could download them from the net if you have the make/model of the motherboard.

Cheers, Lee

[Reiner]

Originally Posted by themoid

I have no idea what RAID is, what it means etc, and how I can install Xp pro on to it. I have seen that when booting from the disc it asks you to press F6 to install raid drivers, but i dont know what drivers it is asking me to install (doh) - are these motherboard drivers, hard drive drivers.

RAID is used for data storage redundancy on harddiscs, see here for details: http://www.recoverdata.com/raidfaq.htm or http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

[Astaroth]

RAID is a way of using a series of hard drives in an "array". There are several different ways they can be used but the most common ones for home use are 0 and 1.

0 splits the data between 2 (or more) disks which speeds up most disk activity as rather than having 1 disk loading up a 10mb file you have 2 disks loading up 5mb files each - with very small files it can be slower though due to the seek/ response times. The danager is that if 1 disk dies you loose everything as each disk only holds 50% of each file.

1 mirrors the data across 2 (or more) disks which gives you much more security for your data - ie you have 2 identical copies of everything so if one hard disk dies for what ever reason you still have a complete copy on the other.

There are more complicated arrays out there... eg using 4 disks - 2 mirrored pairs with data shared across both HDs in each pair which give you the benefits of both but you then start talking about significantly more expensive hardware costs