[Jay_JWLH]

At first I had the usual setup. One HDD, with a OS (Windows XP Home) installed onto it. I have a second HDD that right now is used on and off, so I thought why not RAID 0 it? It is hardware RAID, so as far as I am concerned the computer should only be able to see one HDD which the controller takes care of. RAID 0 has been setup, but this is quite literally where the problems start.

When I try and boot from either the Windows XP Pro CD or the BartPE I don't get very far. On the XP CD the only thing related to the disk that shows up is the initial blue screen with the text "Windows Setup". Also when I try to boot from the BartPE CD, it won't even begin to do the vertical bar thing. By the virtical bar thing, I mean blocks acrross from left to right that has has all the gaps filled to show its progress.

I have tried reseting the BIOS to default values in the BIOIS settings, and changed only the nessesary things like boot order. I have also noticed that only 512MB of RAM is being detected, when in fact there is 512+256. Unless it is causing any problems, I don't mind right now.

I need at least one of these CD's to boot properly before I can move on. Anyone able to help?

RAM: 512MB + 256MB
HDD: 80GB Seagate + 80GB WesternDigital
RAID controller: Promise FASTTRAK66
CPU: 2.4GHz
Optical Drives: CD writer and DVD reader (you could consider this repaced) + CD writer and DVD writer
Name of company: Packard Bell

[jasaiyajin]

Are you loading 3rd party drivers during boot from the windows cd by pressing F6 at the right time and loading the correct drivers for windows to recognize the RAID0 (not really redundant array).

A bit of my history: I've ran a RAID0 setup with duplicate drives (not like yours but same space), a Promise FastTrak133, and after a year or so, the hard drives failed together and only showed their cache size in bios. Afterwards, it was BUGGY at best when loading any computer with one of those drives in it. Bios would take random long times to recognize the drive(s) and only it's cache size would show up. Windows nor Linux would care to see that they ever existed from that point on. My only conclusion is that either a power surge occurred or the raid controller killed the drives. Just a wary warning when using it, make sure you have a warranty at least. That sparked a lifelong hard drive purchase(s) with warranties 3+ years and above.

[Jay_JWLH]

So far it hasn't asked me to do any of that, since nothing shows up at the bottom yet. Both CD's will freeze from the very beginning. However I will see if I can press F6 in that case anyway.
I see your cheap shot at the name. Call it AID instead if you like. I better keep backups of it to the networked computer (much larger), since one drive is as old as the computer while the other is a fair bit newer. They make enough suspicious noise as it is.

[jasaiyajin]

Windows doesn't automatically recognize a RAID setup when installing, you have to manually provide the 3rd party drivers even though bios is dandy with the hardware recognition. To be honest, there was a slight improvement in performance with RAID0; but if you have a lot of ram, couldn't you just load everything into RAM and run heavily accessed files from there? Granted, there will be a longer boot time initially, but somethings gotta give.

[Jay_JWLH]

It would be a lot better if I was given the option of installing anything before installing Windows. That has become the main issue here, you can't get anything more out of it besides a blue screen with the words "Windows Setup". There is nothing else there that will give me an options. In a virtual environment at least it gives you options at the bottom of the screen, but the computer won't give me those options or respond to any of the F keys.

The computer is getting slow as it is, so any increase in performance helps. Since the entire workload is shared between the two drives, I would like to think the performance increase would be significant. However getting everything to start working upon logging in won't be worth it. That would be one of the things I was focusing on improving.

[Jay_JWLH]

I have managed to make some progress. After taking out the less useful optical drive, along with 256MB of RAM (I might get another 512MB to replace it), it has started. It might have come down to a hardware issue after all. This felt like a reasonable conclusion because problems start happening after it tries to detect the hardware before proceeding to install.

I managed to streamline XP (SP2) with SP3, however I don't think Windows Setup managed to detect the RAID controller drivers that I added to the CD as well. However I don't know if the SP3 properly got on there until I sort out the RAID driver issue for now, because I don't know if the driver is supported by XP anyway. We shall soon see when I get a computer that can handle floppies, since the one I am using is far too new for such legacy hardware.

On another note, I took the chance to blow out the dust accumulating in the heatsink/fan over the CPU, which along with some real thermal grease I think will be good for it.

[Jay_JWLH]

To sum up the solution, if you can't get anywhere with a bootable disk after it tells you it is checking your hardware, it is probably your hardwares fault. I bet the problem was mismatched memory in my case. Removing that, installing, and adding it back in did the job.

Also Promise does not provide any drivers on the internet anywhere for XP and newer (despite many sites with the title saying that they do), so I had to end up getting another RAID controller which does support XP. Having a floppy drive was important during setup for the RAID driver, but other than that it functions after all.