help! Computer installation

In that case, I'd personally be tempted to stick a normal SATA drive in & sort the raid out later, but that's just me.

If you don't have any kicking around, then you'll still want the same drivers (I think the D9150's use Intel Matrix anyhow), but it might be safer to disable AHCI & revert back to ATA mode just for the installation.

by that, do you mean take one of the drives out and carry out the install with one drive?

Originally Posted by Caddy2000

by that, do you mean take one of the drives out and carry out the install with one drive?

I was meaning to connect a spare drive & put that in the case permanently, something small, just enough to hold the installation of XP really.

You could take one of the RAID drives out & carry on with the installation (connecting the drive to the normal SATA controller, not the RAID, or disabling RAID), but then converting it back to RAID later could be a royal pain.

If you don't have a spare SATA drive, pop down to the library as I said above.

Cheers Baph,
I've dowloaded the Matrix driver from Dell, and will change to ATA to see if that makes a difference.

Why oh why didn't I get an Apple!!!

[Bibio]

or a usb floppy drive...

if you are really interested i can help you create an unattended installation disc. but it would require you to have a working windows machine.

it loads drivers, apps, os and keys all at the same time .. no user interaction .. just chuck the disk in and press return.

have a look here to see what's involved.

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/

Originally Posted by Bibio

or a usb floppy drive...

That's what I was saying about the Nokia N95 acting as a Mass Storage Device.

[Bibio]

yup .. bit more complicated as in.. you would have to point the os to the drive/folder/driver... but sometimes it wont install properly.

annoyed now! No matter what i do, it won't see the hard drives

[Bibio]

thats because the drivers arent loaded.. or your drive has collapsed..

are you using a windows disc or a re-installation disc supplied by the manufacturer?

Also, in BIOS, what are your SATA settings? You should be on "Combination" not "Raid Autodetect/AHCI". I know that's a tad contradictory to what I wrote above.

Alternatively to this, I'm told the drivers are native on the SP2 version of XP.