Installed XP without RAID drivers

skoolboi

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So I recently convinced my brother to buy a ready built high spec PC from Ebay (could have been my first mistake but mine has been great). I had a spare upgrade to windows 7 disk I gave him which is the same as I used for my computer. Here is the difference, I got him an old copy of XP from a friend, the one I used from my installation I had made from my parents computer so contained RAID drivers as far as I know. He installed his (XP) yesterday and formatted disk as usual but didn't press F6 to install RAID drivers and now when it is turned on it only displays a blank screen. How can this be fixed? As I understand it now has no drivers and is unable to read from anywhere, is this correct? Thanks
 
Installing RAID drivers at install is only for if you are installing Windows on a RAID array. If you don't know what RAID is, you don't have it.
 
I have 4x 1TB in a RAID 0

yes when you install XP that is the only time you can install RAID drivers, so if you are mirroring drives, the installer has to know this.
 
I have 4x 1TB in a RAID 0

yes when you install XP that is the only time you can install RAID drivers, so if you are mirroring drives, the installer has to know this.

So having failed to do this can he restart the installation by entering the BIOS menu and booting from disk? Sorry if this sounds stupid I'm only mildly good with computers. Basically I'm worried he has manage to completely make his new hard drive useless and thus the whole computer but i'm hoping this is just me panicking. Thanks
 
I don't really understand what happened and why you're worried. Did you want him to run in a RAID set up and if so, what type of RAID?

Was the BIOS changed to RAID after windows was installed? If so, that won't work. The controller needs to be set to RAID before the windows install. Being XP, windows won't even see the hard drives without him installing the drivers so he could never have formatted the drive to begin the install.
 
I have 4x 1TB in a RAID 0

yes when you install XP that is the only time you can install RAID drivers, so if you are mirroring drives, the installer has to know this.
why?
you desperately needed a 4TB system drive?
I bet you have that split into a C and D drive?

I suggest you read the guide to raid that I wrote to find out why what you're doing is not a great idea, you just quadrupled your risk of complete catastrophic data loss.
 
yes split the c and d drive root, how did you know?!

i like to use RAID 0 since the any bit is recored on all drives, and if I lost all my data it will end in tears but also is a risk if a major virus infected my system.
 
http://www.computerforums.org/forums/server-articles/guide-raid-208367.html

read the explanation about what RAID 0 is, (aka not real RAID).

then think about the probability of a disk failing.
then think that you have four components in your drive array that must all work, the probability of any one failing at any time may have been 1 in 100, but since you have four drives, it's now 1 in 25. (you quadrupled your probability of catastrophic data loss) the loss of 1 disk means that the entire array is broken and you loose all your data.

Raid 0 does have it's place, where you need to create very large drives, for non-critical data.

with regards creating a massive, but potentially unstable four times more likely to break massive drive. and then splitting it up...

why did you need to create a massive drive and then split it up in to smaller drives?

the answer is probably, you never actually needed to create a 4TB drive in the first place?



why did I bet that you split that 4TB drive into smaller ones...? well it's pretty unlikely that you're running anything that needs a big block of data. at work we support some pretty big organisations, and it's rare that any of them require that sort of sized drive.

So I bet that because, you created the 4TB drive because you could, not because you needed it.
but then you did need a separate system and data drive, so you split your really big disk in two.
 
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