I am trying to install XP. I have two brand new 500 GB SATA Seagate hard drives hooked up to my motherboard. But, for some reason during the setup it keeps saying that it cannot detect any hard drives even I went into my BIOS and can see that the motherboard is detecting atleast of the hard drives.

Do I need to install the drivers for my motherboard and/or the hard drives before running the xp setup??

Also which is better to run. Mirroring or striping and why??

You can either load the SATA drivers (drivers for the motherboard's SATA controller, not drivers for the SATA hard drives) or go in the BIOS & set the SATA controller to an IDE legacy mode (but performance might suffer from that).

& what do you mean by better ? Stripping is better performance-wise but dangerous while mirroring is better safety-wise but you get less space & the speed increase is marginal.

So, I need the cd that came with my motherboard??

Or you need to go to the website of the mobo manufacturer and download the drivers.. Once you have them put them on a floppy and press F6 when the windows install asks you too..

And setup your raid as stripping.. Who cares if you loose everything from a drive dying, speed is everything.. Im running 4 Seagate 320gb SATA2 drives on one array and 2 Seagate 250gb SATA drives in another and the drive access times are insane..

I dropped off my computer to be set up at Staples. I just picked up my computer this morning and for some reason when I start up my computer it says that it is running RAID with striping and has 1 GB of hard drive space which is normal.

However, when I go into My Computer, I see that there are two HDDs. Is this normal??

It should show up as 1 big drive unless you are running some kind of software raid or something like that.. And im sure you mean 1 TB of hard drive space..

Mirrored would read as 500GB, while striped would read as 1 TB.

but striped would also read as one drive when you open "My Computer", right?? cuz it shows up as two separate drives. yea my bad i meant 1 TB.

Again, depends on software or hardware raid.. If your mirrored then you should see 1 500GB drive, if your stripped then it should be 1 1GB drive if your using hardware raid..

Using software raid, you can see the separate drives but address them as a raid drive which will use both of them.. I dont know how(or even if) windows does software raid but I know how its done with Linux..

Are you using a raid controller/motherboard raid controller?

You'll see as many drives as partitions that have been created on your hard drive(s). If your 1TB storage space is partitioned in 50 units, you'll see 50 drives in My Computer.