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I have a EP45C-UD3R motherboard and recently installed a Sil3132 PCI-E controller with 2 500GB Sata2 HD, at bios level the controller is recognized and I can setup my RAID SET which I set to RAID1.

When I go to the windows xp installation with my Windows XP SP3 cd it does not recognize the Raid HD set or w/e it is called (hehe), my computer has no room for Floppy disk nor do I have one.

This computer is on my home network along with my 4 other computers and one of then is my slackware server if there is any network installation that could help me as well in this case.

What could be the problem and how could I debug it in order to install my computer with my new HDs in RAID?

If you need any extra information that I may have skipped please let me know.

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what driver did you use for sil3132 on xpsp3? i tried a couple of drivers but they keep giving to me BSOD – user54667 Nov 5 '10 at 19:07
the ones available for download on the their site (sillicon's site) – Guapo Nov 14 '10 at 15:18
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2 Answers

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You can create an install disk using nlite which enables you to include drivers and windows updates on the install CD.

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Sounds like a plan but if possible i would like a solution where i don't have to waste time recreating my installation disk all over again where there is no guarantee it will work, i was googling around and saw that some people that tried this approch were not able to acomplish it which makes me fall back. – Guapo Sep 16 '10 at 20:29
When I had SATA RAID drivers to install this was the approach I used and it worked fine, I'm afraid I don't know enough about the way nlite works to be able to offer any help on why it might fail. – Phil Sep 16 '10 at 20:47
@Guapo: Fact 1: No matter for what other solutions will be posted here i am certain that Google will always find cases where it didn't work. Fact 2: Without a floppy drive Nlite is the usual way to go. – bytesum Sep 16 '10 at 20:58
ended up doing this with nlite since there was no other option presented that could work out my case, the new pack worked fine with the Sil3132 on Windows XP SP3. Thx. – Guapo Sep 16 '10 at 23:55
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up vote 1 down vote

The point of having a RAID controller / any sort of hardware RAID is that it is invisible to the Operating system.

You should be able to set it up and as far as Windows is concerned, it is a regular hard drive. Windows should not know it is installed on any sort of RAID array.

To get it working, you should have a RAID driver, usually you are able to create this from the RAID setup utility or download from the manufacturers website.

When you install Windows, you simply press F6 during the setup and point it to the RAID controller.

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If you have any sort of RAID program in Windows, this is usually simply there to tell you the status of the RAID array and hard drives, it isn't really anything special as most of the changes or settings are made directly in the setup program.

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The problem is that F6 requests for a floppy and like i previously said i dont have one so i am looking for alternatives to acomplish this, thanks. – Guapo Sep 16 '10 at 20:18
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@Guapo - get a USB floppy drive? Please remember, Windows XP was designed ~12 years ago. – William Hilsum Sep 16 '10 at 20:32
if i could get any sort of floppy i would have done it by now, but unhappyly right now i don't have this option available hence why i am searching for alternatives but thanks. – Guapo Sep 16 '10 at 20:35
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