Striped RAID installation problem with Vista Home Premium 64bit

[Guest]

Hi all,

Have been trying to install Vista home premium 64bit edition on my system, I
have a pair of 35gb SATA drives which I wish to use as a Striped RAID I.E. to
appear as a single 70gig drive, during installation it shows me the option of
installing on either of the 35gig drives but does not show as a combined
drive, I have tried installing the NVIDIA drivers at this point but this does
not show a combined drive after they have installed.

I have I got the set up proceedure wrong ?

Can I install to one of the drives and then combine them after installation ?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Troy McClure]

you have to first CREATE the RAID set. it doesnt sound like youve done that.
this has nothing to do with vista

 

[Guest]

you have to first CREATE the RAID set. it doesnt sound like youve done that.
this has nothing to do with vista

 

[Guest]

At what point are you saying I should create the RAID ?

is this prior to installation or during the process ??

I've set it as striped RAID in the bios but it doesn't appear as a single
drive when I get to the "choose installation drive" stage.

Sorry if I'm being dumb.

 

[Troy McClure]

pretty much all raid cards require you to run a utility separate from the
bios the will create raid volumes.
normally you have to press a function key ar CTRL + something to enter the
RAID config.

what you did in the bios simply enabled raid probably. now you have to
create a raid volume before the OS can see it

 

[Guest]

Thanks again, I'm surprised that there isn't a facility within Vista to do
this.

Is there a recomended Utility ? or should my Motherboard manufacturer have
one of these ??

Cheers

 

[Troy McClure]

server versions of windows can do software raid... you want hardware raid,
which is why vista cant do it. this is lowlevel hardware stuff... vista just
sees the drives in the system as theyre presented to vista.

if the controller is on the motherboard and not an addin card that you
installed, you will definitely see a prompt on the screen during the post

 

[Guest]

From what I can see the NVIDIA RAID utility is accessable by pressing F10
during start up, this allows you to choose Mirror or Stripped set up, I have
performed this and it then gives you a single drive at the end of the process
but I still get two drives on the installation drive screen.

I think I need to try again.

Thanks.

 

[Jeffrey S. Sparks]

I have a VIA raid in my bios and had to hit F10 while booting up to create
the RAID drive (striping). After the bios was done creating the raid drive
i rebooted into vista and it only saw one drive during install. I have
never had to load any software utility to create the raid or have vista see
it.

You may need a special software driver from nvidia that would load during
the vista installation. Might check their website.

Jeff

 

[Guest]

So you didn't even need to use any separate drivers ? just set up after
hitting F10 ?

 

[Jeffrey S. Sparks]

I went thru the bios (by hitting f10) and followed the direction to create
the raid stripe. After that I exited and rebooted to the DVD which saw one
drive (the new raid array) and installed vista onto that.

Jeff