Ongoing First HTPC Project (1 Viewer)

[reverson1]

I'm not sure if have to have a seperate disk for the OS, but I would. But that's just me....

 

[eetaylog]

if i were you i would definately run the OS on a seperate drive (~40Gb). thats how i set mine up, firstly i installed xp on my small drive, then i added the raid array post OS installation. its much easier and it means you dont have to mess about by partitioning one of your dedicated RAID HDD's.

 

[wyzazz]

Here's my take on things.

You are trying to create a RAID Array (Either Striped 0 or Mirrored 1) with your 2 1TB drives. If you stripe them and install XP on them you have a 2TB drive with no fault tolerance, if you mirror them you have a 1TB drive with fault tolerance.

You cannot use XP Software RAID on a drive that contains your OS. I would suggest purchasing another drive around 80GB or more to put your OS on, then Mirror your 1TB drives for your media.

Your issue in getting XP to find the drives on your SATA Controller while installing is related to one of two things.
1. The floppy disk with your drivers on it isn't in the correct format, or has the incorrect drivers on it.
2. You have not setup the RAID Array in the BIOS or with the BIOS's utility. If you do not recall doing this, than this is your problem. Take a look at the Motherboards manual and it should outline how to create this. Check out page 27... ...After setting the BIOS correctly then you will have to setup your RAID Array.

 

[schuess]

I was able to get it working with help.

I don't quit understand why what my friend did worked, but it did. Basically, we enabled Raid in bios, created the raid in the utility, then he marked the raid for rebuild, restarted the PC, began the windows install, hit f6, loaded drivers, and it found the drives. I don't really understand what was done different, but it is working.

Thanks for all your help. I will post the rest of my MP setup and some pics soon.

Thanks

schuess

 

[schuess]

Also part of the problems seem to have stemmed from the fact that I was trying to load this XP Micro version that I had. I may have been doing things right, but the micro version may have been lacking some support for Raid.

I know have my 1 TB Raid 1 config, with a 15 GB OS partition on the same drives.

Thanks again for all your help. Now on to MP configuration issues. ie.. learning how to get my imon/veris remote that came with my Antec Fusion Micro Case to work, as well as the LCD. Lots of fun...