i dont' want to start a new post but this might make you feel, well, if not "better" at least not alone.
I spent a whole afternoon, about 6 hours, trying to rebuild my computer using a SATA raid as the main disk. Trying to install windows would either fail to recognise the drive or crash just after starting to install. Ok, so played with BIOS for at least an hour, changing settings, playing around, swapping ports, trawling tech forums, finally convinced myself that I have it right and that can't be the problem.
So it's gotta be a disk or the controller on the MOBO... More trawling forums, dug up an IDE drive I had kicking around and installed that as the primary disk and what do you know? the raid works as a secondary. Ok, time for diagnostic tools, downloaded a bunch of disk checking utils and spent over an hour doing low level tests on my raid: NOTHING! Not a single problem!
ok, back to installing windows on the raid, same problem! I'm literally at my wit's end at this stage. I'm about to start writing to my motherboard's tech forum when I slowly re-read all the error codes I've been getting for the tenth time, reading one of the errors it occured to me that I was using a XP Pro SP2 windows install disk but the raid drivers I had on disk came out BEFORE SP2, so on a hunch I dug up an old XP Pro SP1 install cd
and
it worked 1st time
like a charm
6 hours after I started....
I saw so much red, if there was anyone else in my room at the time I swear I would have murdered them.
