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Booting from an Array 0 (Windows XP)
I have a LSI Megaraid 300-8x controller with 7 SATA drives. 6 of the drives are 500GB and the 7th is 1TB. I have 4 RAID 0 arrays of 1TB each, the first three being two each of the 500GB drives and the last being the 1TB drive by itself.
I’m new to this and I could not figure out how to install XP to the array itself. (I had it set up using the BIOS based configuration tool but the XP installer couldn’t find a drive.) So, I grabbed a 40GB IDE drive I had and plugged it in to the MB and used it for the install. The IDE is now C: and the array drives are E: F: G: and H:.
What I want is to now install XP to one of the array drives, make it bootable and then pull the IDE drive altogether. (It’s an older drive and doesn’t perform well at all)
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2 Replies
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easy –
you have four RAID 0 arrays – each with two drives (each 500Gig).
You have only one 1TB drive. This is SO EASY.PULL OUT ALL THE RAID 0 drives ! It’s easy to identify – they are all the 500 gig drives. This leaves you with a single 1TB drive.
With only the single drive in the system, pop in your Win XP installer, and load Win XP onto this drive array. You can now boot up off of your system (not so easy, however) –Because the Microsoft Win XP disk is a generic disk, it WILL NOT have the drivers for the LSI – you will have to manually download these from the LSI website. Once you are able to boot up (and your disk uses the LSI drivers) – now you can feel free to plug back in
your other drives. When you plug them back in, they will not show up – you have to go into the Microsoft Disk Manager and “import foreign disks”, and they will all show up.And why are you doing this exactly ? And why are you using four RAID 0 arrays, that only consist of 2 drives – you won’t get any performance from only two drives.
Bob Zelin
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Thanks for the response. I was able to get everything installed with only one hiccup: I chose the wrong partition for the install so now my boot drive is E: instead of C:, but that’s minor. The hardest part was finding a floppy disk around the house! (and learning the ins and outs of the BIOS based RAID configuration tool)
As to why, basically because I can. I inherited this unit with all these drives and a RAID. I’ve NEVER touched anything in a multi-disk environment so I just wanted to play. That being said I would welcome your advice concerning RAID 0,1,5, etc. and drive configuration. Basically I’m using the unit for some audio recording and other than that just general PC stuff. As earlier stated I have 6 500GB drives and 1 1TB drive.
Thanks again for the help.
DWM
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