hello. i have recently been trying to install raid 0 with 2 WD harddrives. i got a pci raid controller card and am using sil680raid driver. when i initailly boot i was able to F3 into the raid utility and creat a striping raid. however, this was all when i was booting off a regular IDE drive. i would like to get rid of that drive and reinstall windows and linux on teh raid drive. however, there is no option in my bios (A06 on a dell dimension 4100). however, when i did add teh raid controller i got two other option in my boot sequence... Option ROM - and - MBA UNDI (Bus000 Slot00) i have no idea what they are. i tried them, but still not able to boot from them. any ideas? thanks a ton. hippiejoe

i will add this now after some more trouble shooting... if i leave a windows 98 cd in the drive and set it to boot form the cdrom. with no other IDE drive (only the raid drive) i get the option to boot from cdrom or harddrive. if i select harddrive it boots fine from the raid. however, without the cd i get a message to insert boot disk. i am going to try and upgrade my bios to A13. if anyone has other advice i would love to hear from you. thanks. hippiejoe

If you installed XP on the RAID while the other HD was still in the machine, you may have to reinstall XP. When you have 2 HDs in the machine with XP, it seems you can only have one Master Boot Record, and it would have stayed on the old HD with the first install of XP. Try reinstalling or repairing and see if that helps. You may not get the option to boot from RAID in BIOS, but it sounds like your BIOS treats the RAID like a plain HD. If the option exists in your BIOS boot menu, choose 'try other boot devices'. Let us know if this helps.

I think MrSecret's right. you should remove the IDE drive reinstall XP on the RAID drive and get that working. then reboot without the CD in place. The last thing to do would be to remount the IDE drive that should force the RAD drive to be designated as C:

hey everyone thanks for the help. however, i did do a fresh install of windows 98 on the raid drive originally without the original IDE drive which contained my old dual win/linux mbr. however, late last night i seemed to beable to boot off the raid drive (still without the original IDE) as long as i had the 98 cd in the drive...which gave me the cd or harddisk boot option. now i am just getting a blank cursur. however, it still recognizes my raid. what is weird is that...without the original IDE drive plugged in, i cannot even boot from a win98 startup disk, or the cd rom, or anything. i am getting confused here. everything i have read and other help forums say to select the scsi option in bios to be the lead booter. but i don't have that though my raid controller seems to be working "properly". I upgraded my bios to A11 and still no luck. any other advice. thanks takecare. hippiejoe

It's worth trying the SCSI boot option in BIOS.