SATA RAID 0 with a K8N Neo Platinum Board

Recently I decided to upgrade my PC, something I do often as one who likes to have the best PC I can with the little money I make . It was all going fine, and still works, but an upgrade I wanted seems to be causing me serious issues. I ordered two identical SATA harddrives (see below for all details of my system I think are needed) planning on RAID-0 them for my system. Following the instructions, I turned RAID on in my BIOS, and told my computer which hard drives I wanted RAID together. One point, the two working hard drives I had, I disconected, so all that are in are my new SATA drives. Once stating which I choose, I inserted my Windows disk, telling it I wanted to install RAID drivers. Here is where it gets tricky, and the problem arises. Since XP does not know SATA drivers (apparently), I had to get a 'manufactors' set of drivers. The instruction manual walked me through coping a folder over onto a floppy from the CD that came with my MOBO. Poped the floopy in, specified that I had the drivers and than the error poped up. I called up MSI tech support, but that came to a dead end, just telling me to try DLing the folder from the net instead of using the CD. Same error showed, now I am not sure what I should try to do to fix this. Nor am I sure what drive it refers to as D since before one of my HD was the D drive, though that is no longer presently attached.

MOBO - K8N Neo Platinum
Version 1.2
Processor - AMD Athalon 3000 64 bit
RAM - 1024 DDR
HD - Seagate 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model ST380013AS
Error Message (exact wording) - File txtsetup.oem caused an unexpected error (512) at line 1742 in d:\XPClient\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.

 

installing windows on a raid array is a bit tricky. have you tried using the floppy disk that the mobo manufacturer gave you? or downloading drivers straight from the manufacturer of the sata controller?

 

The board did not come with any floppies, but the instruction manual told me what to do to basically create a driver disk. I tried using it when XP asked for a support from the Manufactur, but thats when the damn error arose.

 

hrm... two things come to mind:

your floppy drive could be bad (i've actually come upon a few before, and one actually impeded my own windows install on a raid). maybe you can try using another computer's drive?

maybe it's not the drivers at fault... it's possible that your windows xp cd is bad or something. i highly doubt that's the case, though. but if you want, you can try to borrow a friend's xp cd and try to install windows with it. JUST BE SURE TO USE YOUR OWN CD KEY if you're going to attempt it.

oh, and another thing: i heard that it's pretty darn hard to successuflly install windows xp if you have anythign set to "master" on either ide channel when running sata raid. just a thought.

 

Than the question is, should I keep my RAID drives slaves? Doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of RAID? The speed wouldnt be as effective if only a slave.