Repairing Windows XP

[Fo0zy]

I built the computer myself. if any specs are needed I can tell ya.

I am trying to repair my windows xp currently installed.

My hard Drives are set up as a RAID 0 Stripe, for those of you familiar, you know that windows cd cannot detect the hard drives without the RAID drivers.

I have a USB External Floppy Drive which I am trying to use to Load the drivers during the repair. The problem I run into is, when it asks me if I want to Load third party ScSi's/ or Raid drivers, hit f6. So I do and windows loads up it's files then I come to the screen where I specify where The drivers should be loaded from.

It says please insert disk into Drive A: So I put in the disk that has the drivers on it in my floppy and hit enter.

It seems that windows cannot detect it as a floppy, because it doesn't even hit it at all. I have also tried USB storage devices and it does not work either..

SO I spent all last night Changing things in the BIOS (Trial and error) and nothing happened.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[Tmagic650]

You need to get the system to see the floppy. Is it detected in the bios? If not, you may be able to put the RAID drivers on a CD

 

[Fo0zy]

it's detected as a valid floppy drive in BIOS, already tried putting them on a cd, but windows only wants to scan "A:" for the drivers, even though I have no such drive on my computer. there isnt a way to select anything else. thinking of just a complete format and installing without raid...

 

[mailpup]

Windows installation will only recognize an internal A drive floppy in this third party driver installation. I would consider just buying an internal floppy and installing it. They cost less than $10 (USD) often only around $5. In the future you'll run into this same problem every time you reformat the hard drive with the OS on it.

If you would still rather not buy a floppy, you can create a slipstream CD with an XP SP2 CD and the requisite SATA/RAID drivers. I've never had to do this myself so I don't know the whole procedure but google "slipsteam xp raid" or slipstream xp sata" or similar wording.

BTW, if you built the PC yourself, how did you install the RAID drivers before?