P-6831FX RAID Windows XP

I've been looking over a few threads here and there about setting up RAID0 for Windows XP on the 6831FX notebook, and cannot for the life of me figure why I'm still getting the "Unknown Disk (There is no disk in this drive.)" at XP installation.

Let me start by saying I have two Hitachi 7K200 200GB drives set at RAID0 within the BIOS, and have Vista installed as a portion of space on the drive. Vista works perfectly fine, but I need to install Windows XP since my DPC on Vista is terrible, and need a very low latency for my firewire audio recording hardware/software. I downloaded the Gateway drivers for the Mass Storage device (I believe the first link at the Gateway site), unpacked it, went into the F6 (32-bit) directory, slipstreamed those onto my Windows XP CD, then booted into the slipstreamed driver version. It showed that it was loading the iaStor driver, but found no devices on which to install the operating system. So I loaded the original Windows XP CD into the drive, booted up with it, and placed the floppy into a USB floppy drive I had laying around and tried to press F6 to load from the floppy. This, unfortunately, has produced the same error, "Unknown Disk (There is no disk in this drive.)". I then looked some more on the internet, and found this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=217666

Which allowed me to load up with the drive being listed. However, I had to go to work, and had to shutdown the computer at this point. So I loaded it back up once I got to work, and the same disk couldn't find the drive! WTF!? So multiple attempts resulted in the same issue. So I went to my Vista drive, redid the CD like was shown in the thread I listed above, and only set the nLite to method 1 instead of method 2 (which was load the drivers into the $OEM$ directory like I did originally with the slipstreamed WinXP at the start). This allowed me to view the drive once again and allowed me to begin installation. But after installing the setup files, it tried to load from the drive, and it said "Invalid drive" and didn't load into the Windows XP Pro setup program to begin fully installing Windows XP.

I then reloaded the CD to see if it would recognize my drive so I could just wipe every partition off the drive, then install Windows XP first. It recognized, but it is also displaying Unknown Disk (There is no disk in this drive.) but underneath it, displays my hard drive. After a re-format, and after the setup copied the files, it again said "Invalid Drive"!

I'm beginning to think this is impossible. I've never had this much trouble setting up a PC to get on RAID. I would love to use the Intel iaStor driver and get that stupid Unknown Device error off my screen!

Any ideas? Anyone run into this problem and get it fixed? I'm completely out of ideas.

 

As of currently, I did some more searching and trying various methods to get the RAID 0 to work, and have a decently working version. I needed to follow the link in my previous post, and instead of pressing the "Slipstream!" button, I needed to press the ">" button up until the point of asking for Method 1 or Method 2. The default for me had the radio button selected to Method 2, but I selected Method 1 (which was use the $OEM$\$1\drivers\... directory instead of execute an unpacking utility at the start of the CDs execution). I then reburned my slipstreammed Windows XP Pro CD using CDBurnerXP (which is amazing), rebooted, and it saw my hard disk drives in RAID. It still shows Unknown Device within the drive listing, but does display my RAID setup.

I then placed a new partition on the RAID for Windows XP, installed to the first reset, and came up with an Invalid System Disk error, which after some frustration, found it was because I had my USB flash memory stick in a USB port. This was causing the PC to not boot, as the PXE (Pre-boot eXecution Environment...used primarily for disk-less desktops...or thin clients) was looking for a boot route. Once the stick was removed, it continued to load normally.

Also, if anyone is looking at lowering DPC on Windows XP Pro, I don't recommend having a RAID 0 setup. I don't get higher latency numbers (which highest for me has been 322 microseconds), but I do get higher latency more frequently (which if using DPC Latency tool shows up as more frequent "spikes", but still below the first green threshold).

Windows Vista with DPC on the other hand... well, it's just bad. Too many resources being used.