The RAID card was mistake. It's designed for using pairs or more of hard
drives to write data to in a fashion that either stripes the data onto
the drives to spread the file load around simulating a larger drive on
the two of them, or write the data to both of them together, to create a
redundant file system with the data duplicated on both drives.
Either way you need at least two drives to mount a RAID file system. I'm
not even sure if you can hook up a single drive to a RAID controller and
get it to work by itself. You should have looked for a plain SATA drive
controller card. I've never actually had a RAID setup myself 'though,
so I suppose it might be possible to forego installing the RAID drivers,
and just use the card as a SATA drive controller only, and it might work
that way.
Either way you will need to install SATA drivers to get the operating
system to recognize the drive, and I'm pretty sure that XP has a point
early during it's install process, where it stops, and asks if you need
to install SATA drivers, as I've read that several times on these
groups. It gives you the opportunity at that point to install them, then
continues the Windows install afterwards.
I still have an old fashioned EIDE controller and drive in this system.
No narrow data cables for me yet. 8-)
so, check out the specs on that RAID controller and see if it can be ran
as a single drive controller, and if so, go ahead and install it in the
slot, and attach the SATA drive to it. then set your BIOS up to boot
from the CD rom drive first, and boot up with the XP install disc.
Now you will have to just keep a sharp eye on things, to see if there is
any point where you can interrupt the install process to install the
SATA drivers. Since I've never had a SATA drive before either yet, I'm
not too sure how that goes, I just know from what I read in these groups.
Later, Ray Parrish
Ronn Cross wrote:
> i have a DELL PENT IV 2.6g missing the hard drive. I purchased A seagate baracuda 7200.10 250 gbytes SATA. unknown to me my ribbon data cable would not connect. I have now purchased a SATA RAID controller card(CreativeI/O) with data cable & a power cable.I'm quite sure I can physically install the hardware, but I'm lost about starting up the controller card, adding drivers,putting back on XP pro. Also I had to purchase a rescue disk for xp pro from DEll. I hope this makes sense...as you can see I am a beginner novice.
> Any or all help would be highly appricated.....ronn
>
> Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
> Digest mode - visit our web site:
> http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml
>
>
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