installing XP on non-compaq machine with a 4200 controller.

[Jack_71]

the situation is this.

i have a 4200 controller and several seagate 15k's laying around after doing a upgrade and i wish to put them to use in my desktop machine but am having problem doing so.

final goal: have three of these 15k's in a striped array ran off of the 4200 as the system drive (C:).

difficulties: when the drives are attached to the controller and i attempt to install xp the controller is not recognized inherently by windows. i can not find a suitable driver from HPaq to recognize the controller during the "hit f6" period to install the controller. if i allow the install to pass through the "f6" option without specifing the controller then no discs are found to install to.

my thoughts: i need the proper driver for the controller to be used at the "f6" specify point but am unable to find one at HPaq's site or i am not on track at all and i need to be educated by someone as to the correct procedure on how to perform.

side note: i am installing on abit nf7-s mobo. obviously i can't use SmartStart due to the fact it's not a compaq machine but i am sure that someone has to have inside track on how to do this.

thanks for the time.

[Jeremy Black]

Interesting, I am trying a VERY similar thing with my ABIT AN7 mobo with my Smart Array 431 controller. I tried installing XP and pressing F6 to use the Compaq drivers, but that did not work because of the lack of the txtsetup.oem file. I hacked a txtsetup.oem file from a adaptec scsi driver and that did not work either.. it blue-screened. Anyway, I saw another article that said to install the OS on a IDE hard drive and then set up the raid controller once the OS boots up. Then, set up the raid array. After that, it suggests to reboot and try installing the OS to the RAID array instead of the IDE hard drive. I tried that with XP, but I could not even get the RAID card to work in XP. I will try with 2000 tonight. Any other ideas?
Thanks.. and good luck.
-Jeremy

[Jack_71]

well, thats why we post and read this forum.... i would have to think that installing to a ide drive and then after completeing the setup ghosting the image to the array would do the trick nicely...

i solved my situation a while back with a totally different solution but i think that i will try this just to see if it'll work.

[Jeremy Black]

Jack... thanks for the quick reply. Here is a quick update. I was able to install XP on my IDE drive and then configure the RAID 5 on the 431 controller using the drivers from my SmartStart CD. However, when I tried to reinstall Windows on the RAID array, it does not see the array. I guess Compaq just doesn't support the F6 option when it asks for drivers... they only support their proprietary SmartStart technique. So I guess I will still with using a SATA hard drive for the primary, and then use the RAID 5 to store all my important data. Which one do you think is faster anyway? I have RAID 5 on Smart Array 431 card with 4 Ultra2 SCSI hard drives, 10K RPM... but how will that compare with the 150mb/sec of SATA? Cya round Jack...

[Jack_71]

imho, the difference in bench numbers is there but in real life how big of a deal is it to see your data 0.1 of a second later... i have come to this realization after spending many thousands of dollars on different scsi setups.

[Jeremy Black]

Yeah... the main thing I am looking for is reliability since I have lost two Seagate hard drives in the last year in my home machine. I have lost lots of family pictures due to this, so, being a NT Server Admin, I got pissed and decided to bring a card home and some drives and do some real data reliability with RAID 5 with an online spare. Hehehe... I don't see any other way to avoid data loss in a real way... other than backups, which only saves you from your last snapshot.

Nice talking to you man... lemme know if you get something cool working like this.

[Jack_71]

well, what i did was to setup a machine (proliant 3000) install a promise controller sx6000 and 6 ibm 120gb drives. this setup was terrible... the promise card is buggy and imho should be stayed way away from. my solution was to buy an external raid box that houses 12 ide drives and has a onboard raid controller. the box is populated with 12 200gb ide drives and is connected to the controlling box via a scsi 68pin cable. this gives me in excess of 2tb of storage, a hotswap backup drive, and a spare drive. to date i have had no problems with this confiq other then attempting to get it back'd up in a reasonable amount of time. i use a compaq dlt 35/70 tape drive and about 15 tapes to accomplish. please keep in mind that this is a home setup. i have decided that for a home setup of normal needs scsi is to much hardware in most cases. it cost to much initially, is to hot, and consumes far to much power for everyday use, atleast in the amounts needed for my setup. i do use four 15.3k 36gb seagate u320 scsi drives in my dual proc amd machine for video editing but only turn it on when i know i will be doing a fair amount of video editing.

[John_687]

Jack: I'm sorry no one replied with any help. But if I may, I also have a question for you.

You said you solved your problem using a completely different method. What was that method?