XP install on nForce RAID

[robeward]

I recently got a second hdd and decided to put the two I have in RAID 0. The hdd's are the exact same drive. Seagate Barracuda 320GB. Since my computer does not have a floppy drive I tried to use nlite to slipstream my raid drivers. I didn't have any trouble with that.

After the bios screen my raid shows as a healthy stripe. When I get to the OS partitioning part I see three unpartitioned spaces.

There is a sentence right above them that says 610486 MB Disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on nvraid [MBR].

I was under the impression that once I got to this point if everything was working well that I would see one big drive close to 640GB that I would be able to partition as I please.

Am I a badly mistaken newbie, did I most likely screw up the nlite, use the wrong drivers or what?

Points of interest:
One hard did have XP on it previously.
I have tried different driver combos(MSI, nvidia).
When it shows that I have a healthy stripe it says of size 591GB.
I have a P6N platinum MB with an updated bios.
Installing XP 32bit with SP2.

Thanks for the help!

[tjwasiak]

I don't understand what's your problem... 320GB is advertised capacity, in fact the drive capacity is around 320 000 000 000 bytes which is ~305175MB and ~298GB. So it is totally normal that your BIOS sees 591GB stripped RAID, and the XP installer says 610486MB!!!

BTW. Why not using XP SP3? You can slipstream it with nLite or by hand if you wish...

[TwL]

might add other than above that when you install you partition the drive at installation, if you choose use all available space it will be the full size.

You cannot 'string' an volume from XP unless using certain tools like Acronis Disk Director or such which ain't free. So, on installation partitioning the 'root'/C: drive to what you want your system drive to use and partition rest of empty space after installation would be possible. Didn't exactly understand what '3 unpartitioned spaces' you ment. Like what are the sizes?

Those extra 136Mb you got there are the start sections because it's raid and indeed it's 298Gb in windows actual size of 320Gb Seagate drive.

[robeward]

Sry for the confusion. I know what raid is, just never set it up before so I'm not sure what it is supposed to look like to the OS.

I just assumed (bad i know) that when I got to the partitioning part of the installation that I would have one big chunk of space (or have to delete old partitions if I so choose to make one chunk) when instead I have three.

All three are labeled as "unpartitioned space" of sizes 81917MB, 223318MB, and 305251MB. I cannot delete these spaces. I can only choose one of them to install to and can't choose a size bigger than the number for that section.

This led me to believe that the OS didn't recognize my RAID which in tern would mean that the drivers didn't get installed correctly.

My question, does it appear that my RAID is working fine or not?

Thanks

[robeward]

Forget it guys. I guess I just needed a little trial and error. I went ahead and installed XP on one of those blocks of memory even though it wouldn't let me change it. Once installed I went to disk manager and cleared out everything there. Then did the install again. The second time it would let me delete the C: partition and then my disk space showed up correctly. I guess it was there the whole time I was just being over concerned.

[garikfox]

FYI - XP nForce RAID needs "Two" drivers after the famous F6 keystroke.