RAID Setup - What's Going On?

[Seigfried]

For a change of pace, I don't believe I have a problem. But I am very
confused about what just happened and I was hoping someone might be
able to help clear it up.

I just finished installing Vista on a new, freshly installed pair of
hard drives using NVidia RAID 1 (Mirrored) built into the motherboard
(Gigabyte) and a new, freshly-assembled-from-parts computer.

The install "seemed" to work great and was much faster than any
previous experience. (I've built half a dozen computers in the past
and installed XP quite a number of times ... but never with RAID
before.)

I was all prepared with a floppy (I bought and installed a floppy
drive just for this) with RAID drivers downloaded from the Gigabyte
web site. I had previously configured the BIOS for RAID and added both
(identical) drives into the RAID configuration using a separate RAID
BIOS setup. I anticipated having to "press F6" to install the drivers.
I had read instructions on the Gigabyte site that clearly said that it
would be necessary to use RAID. And I also anticipated having to
format and partition the hard drives. This was a process that always
consumed at least a half hour or so in the past.

But none of this ever happened. Vista copied the files to the RAID
drive C: and installed without ever asking for a driver and without
doing any detectable format or partition.

What happened? Are the drives FAT or NTFS? Why didn't the install even
ask for updated drivers? Why weren't they formatted?

 

[Seigfried]

Might have been a native RAID & Vista installation was able to detect it

& assign the drivers automatically.

Thanks for the reply ...

I don't know what a "native RAID" is. And it still doesn't tell me why
Vista was able to immediately start using the RAID without any
formatting for partitioning.

 

[don't look]

Vista has some raid drivers it can use during install. Also, your
motherboard may not need a driver.Some Nforce4 ultra and SLI boards
don't.That's native(hardware) support.Could be others too.