Help!! please i am having problems instaling windows xp on my new computer.

i am running 2; 120gig SATA hard drives that are raided striped. i got the raid set up, the drives all formated with fat 32. for some reason windows does not see the dard drives when booting up.

i have tried some soft wear and drivers but i dont know much about it so im looking for any help...

when windows says "press f2 (or f6) to specify scsi controller" you need to do that even before you enter the setup stuff for XP/2000

What version of Windows are you trying to install? 2K? XP?

If you're using the array as a boot drive you'll have to use the driver disk that came with your controller/mobo during the install. When it's loading the device drivers it should say "Press F6 to install additional drivers" or something similar on the status line. Thats when you plop in your driver floppy or CD.

Fark is right. SATA can be a pain to set up, make shure you have the right RAID controllers for your MOBO, SATA is ran through the RAID controller on a number of boards. If you are still having problems call the MOBO's tech line, they may know what setting you are missing to set up the system

wait you're running 120 gigs on Fat 32 ... umm to my knowledge that exceeds the limit of fat 32 and you'll need to reformat them to NTFS. Unless you have 4 or more partitions. Also i assume since you didn't know that you're also running Raid-0 so that's actually 240gigs.

"In theory, FAT32 volumes can be about 8 terabytes; however, the maximum FAT32 volume size that Windows XP Professional can format is 32 GB. Therefore, you must use NTFS to format volumes larger than 32 GB. However, Windows XP Professional can read and write to larger FAT32 volumes formatted by other operating systems."

And finally -- why are you running raid? Is there a reason you need one partion of 240gigs? Personally i have one partition for windows/programs and one for downloads/music/movies/pictures/etc. Makes things easier when reinstalling.

what the hell does any of that have to do with his problem?

he should not be using fat32.

The best way to fix this is to download windows FD Pro if it supports your raid controller.
The simple solution to this is to install on to a single drive then use a utility to build your raid/copy the file.
But truely windows XP pre SP1 is not ready to handle SATA boot.

netbsd will run it...

the drives are already formatted, hence, NO PROBLEM

they are not "really" formated. Do this make a 240 gig fat 32 partition, put 200 gigs of data on it, opps, where is the data?

i dont see what you are getting at... if i create a 240gb fat32 partition, itll work just fine. itll be slow as hell, but itll work.

In regular windows XP it will not work. I have had this issue many times.
Mee do you know Spikes?, never mind, STFU.
“Data corruption may occur if either of the following conditions is true: You use this registry value to enable 48-bit LBA support in the original release version of Windows XP Home Edition or of Windows XP Professional. You install an earlier version of Windows on a disk partition that was previously created by a 48-bit aware operating system, such as Windows XP SP1. And that disk partition is equal to or larger than the current addressable limit of 137 GB.”


Spikes please read Microsoft Knowledge Base Article – 331958, Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303013 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];331958

With Fat32 you have some special issues relating to how are you formatting your raid array, because you can not do it in the XP set up.

May I ask why FAT32 anyway. I'd go NTFS just because of it's superrior file handeling system, and much less wasted HDD space.

have any of you READ the first post in the thread? all this information is irrelevant

If it's booting up then have you already installed windows?
if so what harddrive did you do that on?
If windows only lets you make a 32 gig partition then how do you expect it to see an "invalid" partition.