Ok,
I'm currently in the process of trying to setup a XP duel boot with Vista already on board. I read the tutorial everything makes sense. Ok here is where i start noticing some strange happenings.

I have a duel SATA hard drive set up. 2x 160 gig spinners combined to make up 300gig single hard drive using Raid 0. Presently I have 178gigs free, when I go to the system management utility and then go to shrink hard drive it scans my computer and comes back with only 3100mbs available. I think "well that’s not right, but it is enough for an XP install so I’ll just go with it." So now I have my XP partition, a healthy primary partition, I pop my XP disk in and restart my computer. My boot order is CD, Hard drive, then floppy, XP begins booting from the CD, loads drivers, all is well. Now here is the wall, when XP asks me where I want to install to, the options are nothing, in the box it says "unknown drive, no disks installed” or something to that effect. Then as soon as I hit any button, I get the blue screen of death and have to restart.

Any Suggestions? Format everything and start over? Replace the hard drives because they clearly have become possesed by the devil? Take it out side and shoot it?

Thanks

You likely need the RAID drivers for XP to properly identify your RAID controller.
XP setup will prompt you for the driver on floppy, "Press F6 to install RAID drivers".
Heres a great tutorial on how to make a XP install CD that includes the drivers you will need for your board.
Beginners Guides: Unattended Windows 2000/XP Installations - PCSTATS.com

On a related note, here's a link to make an offline update CD for Microsoft products. It downloads all the updates and makes an ISO ready to be burned to CD/DVD. It's much, much faster than downloading them from within IE too.
http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/offl...nload_uk.shtml

Awsome Moose, this will get me started.

UPDATE...
Ok, so I went through and made the XP install disk with the updates and service pack installed on it. But when I go to install the operating system it still shows that there are no Drives to install the OS on. However, the SATA drives that I have, are the ones that where used when my Mother Board was an ASUS A8N SLI Delux, sense then I have upgraded to an ASUS M2N-SLI Delux. Are the drivers nessary different? If so, where can i get them?

Thanks

The boards have different RAID controllers. You can get the drivers from Asus.
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=M2N-SLI%20Deluxe

\o/ *bows* thank you squirrelmoose.

Update...
Ok, so now that I had the right RAID drivers I managed to get XP installed. All went well, on the first boot it got to the XP windows splash screen stayed there for a second and blue screened and restarted. So i let it boot back up and it gave me the option to start in safe mode, so i tried safe mode, and it again blue screened and restarted. So I repaired my bootrec with vista and here I am again. What in the world am I doing wrong? As a side noted I am installing XP off the factory disk, it is XP home version 2002.

Quick intro to my computer, AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, M2N-SLI Delux, 2 Gigs of DDR2 Ram, Nvidia 8800GTX, ect ect ect....

Put your new ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard cd in the drive, When it autostarts there is menu tab called Make Disk, and this is the utility to make the Raid setup driver disk.

The manual explains the procedure better than I can typing it up this morning.

Go to pages 5 - 27 to 5 - 42. The bit you need is on the last page, but it does not hurt to refresh your memory regarding setting up Raid arrays...

__________________


Wombat's: Bulldozers of the bush...

Yeah, the problem I seem to be having now, following a clean install of XP is that XP crashes to restart as soon as the splash screen hits. So I'm not sure now if I have a corruption issue on my hard drives, an incompatibility between that version of XP and my existing hardware or what. I'm scratching my head on this one, I wish there was an error code or something that I could give you but so far there is nothing.. I’m grateful for anything you can come up with.

Thanks!