I have a couple of WD 160G SATA drives that I want to run in RAID-0. Got them plugged in and formatted and I want to do a fresh install of WinXP x64. Problem is that to get the OS install disc to recognize the drives, I need to first install the RAID drivers. Currently when the install starts it fails because it says there is no hard drive. My motherboard documentation instructs that I need to create and intall these drivers via a floppy drive... but I don't have one. What is the workaround for this, or do I need to go out and buy a floppy drive? It seems ridiculous that I should need a floppy drive at this point. Can't I just load these drivers from a CD or a USB drive?

go out and buy a USB floppy drive there not that expensive and you may need it someday for something elese

Try this link: Add RAID drivers and Service Pack 2 to your original Windows CD! Michael J

And another thought. You could try using a USB flash drive. Some motherboards are capable as recognizing them as the a: drive. Plus, I believe with some motherboards (nForce4 for example) the RAID capabilities for the SATA connectors for the nForce chipset are native to the motherboard and you shouldn't need drivers. If you have that type of board make sure you are using the SATA connectors from the nForce chipset and not the additional SATA headers which are added through a 3rd party chip. Michael J

If the mboard came with SATA onboard, check out the CD that came with the mboard - the same SATA drivers are often on the mboard CD somewhere as well, often in uncompressed form. If you don't find them there, you'll have to either: - download, extract if necessary, and burn the needed files onto a CD (a DVD disk probably won't be recognized early in Setup), or - borrow or get yourself a USB floppy drive, assuming a USB floppy drive is recognized in the first part of Setup. I don't know about Win XPx64 , but recently I found that in XP MCE 2005 SP2 (which is XP Pro SP2 with some features removed and multimedia features added), and probably all other XP's, USB flash drives are not recognized until much later in Setup, when it's too late to install the SATA drivers, so they're useless at the beginning of Setuo and till later in Setup.

The mboard I discovered that on is an Asus A7V600 model, about two years old. It's bios can be set to boot from a USB floppy drive, so it seems it's bios has no problem recognizing a USB drive - whether Windows Setup can in it's earlier stages is another matter. If your mboard is old enough that it's bios can't recognize a USB floppy drive, even if Windows can once Windows is loaded, Setup may not be able to recognize a USB floppy drive in it's earlier stages in that case.

I tried the USB drive option but it didn't take. The actual response now is "The disk cannot be read because it contais an unrecognized file system." either because: a) The MB won't really recognize a drive of 1G as a floppy and that's what I have. It says that in the BIOS config that I can force a USB drive to be recognized as a floppy but it needs to be 530M or smaller. or b) The "disk" doesn't get formatted correctly. To create the driver disk I'm supposed to run makedisk.exe from the MB support CD. This program will not create the disk to the flash drive so on another PC I created the floppy and then copied it to the flash drive. Still didn't work though. Roxio disc copier wouldn't let me copy the A) drive so that way didn't work either. Thanks for all the help so far. I guess at this point I could pull the floppy out of the other PC, put it in the new one and presumably it would work. What bugs me about this solution is that it seems ridiculous that I need to use a floppy driveat all. I haven't used one for anything in at least 3 years and I know many computers that don't have them anymore.