Have solved the problem. I looked into trying to format the drive with a dos disk and found one.I then got the disk formatted ok. I then went for an xp load and when I got to the f6 bit I selected 3rd party drivers.Xp carried on then asked for my disk into A: which I did and selected the raid controller. I then get a message from xp saying it has a copy of viamraid.sys and which one would I prefer to use. I selected the one I was supplied. Xp then said I could not do that I had to use its one. (so why ask?) So i selected continue and off xp went and finally loaded it self. So I am now up and running at last. It would seem there was some kind of conflict or whatever between the 2 versions of viamraid.sys but after formatting the drive it seemed to make it easier for xp to sort itself out. Thanks again for the suggestions.