Fresh installing Dell 9100... do I need RAID stuff?

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

I have a Dimension 9100 and want to do a fresh install of XP. The only disc I can create is the Dell OS Recovery CD. I've read in lotsa places about needing to press F6 on installing XP to select a RAID disc or something. All I know is that I have the following:

320GB Serial ATA RAID 0 Stripe [2x160GB 7200rpm ]

I want XP to have just one HD shown (C as it currently is. Do I need to make some kinda disc for this setup? Also, a side note, I have something called the Intel Matrix Storage Manager that shows up after the BIOS. Do I need to manually install this after XP or is it built-in to the BIOS? Thank you so much.

 

[IronDuke]

Yes. You'll need to copy the raid drivers to a floppy. Without raid implemented you'd have two discs which would be seen as C: and D: if you didn't create smaller partitions. You still need the raid drivers with this set-up.

 

[Samstoned]

as it has been mentioned before you can also create a new xp install with the sata drivers slipstreamed in
if no floppy you can burn a cd utility boot disc
I find if you gather up as many utilities as you can find use barts boot disc to load you should have no problems with driver installs.
check the dell disc it may already have the drivers for the sata device