Indeed, I did do that. Again, Windows does recognize the created volume
( 2 120GB SATA drives), but refuses to format the disks. I've installed
the Intel RAID driver at the proper point, and it too is recognized by
Windows. The problem is that setup stops dead when it's time to format so
the installation can proceed.
Your wording above concerns me: it says there are TWO 120 SATA drives?
Then it is not seeing a RAID 0 volume, it's seeing the two drives
seperately. It should report a single 240 gig disk. I would start from
the beginning again, during bios init press cntrl-I and get into the Intel
Bios. Delete all volumes, remake the raid 0 volume and reboot. verify
that the intel bios screen reports the raid 0 volume (in green letters).
Do the F6 trick during XP Setup to install the IAA drivers, and then have
XP Setup delete all partitions on the drive and then make a single inital
partition to install XP onto. At next step format that partition NTFS.
tips:
make sure you have the latest IAA and IAA floppy:
http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/
after you get XP up and running initially, install the intel chipset (XP
Setup did not know about the 865/875 chipsets when it was built, unless
you let setup connect w/ the internet and get updates during the setup
process)
http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/
set stripe size to either 128K (the default) or 64K. ignore advice to
set it any smaller. Yes, smaller stripes will give better HDTach scores,
but NOT better real-world performance. leave the ntfs cluster size at 4K
(xp setup doesn't let you change this anyway).
DO partition the drive! a base partition of 20 or 40 gigs should be
fine for XP and your programs. You could put your programs onto a second
partiton, tho that really does not buy much (other than faster defrag
times). You probably DO want to move user's My Document folders to a
second (non-system) partition at a later point, tho again it doesn't buy a
whole lot, and can get confusing too. Create any additional partitions
AFTER you get XP installed, using Disk Manager. And always make just the
partitions you need at the time; you can leave un-partitoned space on the
drive, it's not a sin! You can grow into it over time as needed. When/if
partition management becomes a pain then buy Partition Magic.
DO use NTFS. In XP it's fastest/best (was not true in some W2K
situations tho). MAKE SURE you wipe all partitions on the drive w/ the
XP Setup routine, it "aligns" the MBR and partition table properly for
best NTFS usage (FDISK does not do it right, if you leave old FDISK
created partitions it may make the disk real slow).
Good Luck...
