dtocci

I had a striped raid array on an nVidia nForce4 chipset on my Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. One of the two drives died and I sent out for a warranty replacement drives. Being cautious, I decided to do a web search for my hardware to identify any trouble spots dealing with installing XP on a new striped array. I was horrified when I read about all the endless reboots people were experiencing in this forum and elsewhere. After reading this forum, I was under the impression that I had to slipstream a new disk and do a host of other things I had no experience doing. In the end, I decided to take my chances. I built the new stripe array in the bios and when installing windows I hit F6 and used the drivers from the 6.85 package (nForce4_x16_6.85_winxp2k_english.exe). It worked very smoothly. No endless restarts. No problems. The only catch was the fact that I have another raid array on a raid card on my machine, and when I installed both sets of drivers my data drive was C: instead of my windows drive. That was annoying to me, so I installed fresh again, this time only loading the nForce drivers with F6 and waiting for windows to be installed before installing the drivers for the raid card. Now my windows drive is C: and all is right with the world. So, for anyone out there with the same board and a raid array, fear not. F6 works just fine with the 6.85 drivers on a floppy, specifically the contents of the sataraid folder. I hope this information saves somebody some time. (Oh yeah, in case it makes a difference, the drives are identical 74Gb 10,000 RPM SATA 2 Western Digital Raptors.)