Dear Sirs,
I'm unsure whether I should be posting this to an XP newsgroup or a
newsgroup specific to my motherboard, so apologies if I've made the
wrong choice by posting here.
My problem: I'm looking to install Windows XP 64-bit Professional onto
a system with a RAID-1 array, but I have so far been unable to create a
working driver disk for the F6 prompt at the start of the install.
When I press 's' followed by Enter to tell the installer to read the
disk, it accesses the floppy drive but returns me to the screen
prompting for the "Manufacturer-supplied hardware support disk" to
press Enter again after 15-20 seconds.
Here's my set up:
AMD 3000+ 64-bit processor
Giga-byte K8NS Pro motherboard (not too impressed with at this point)
One stick of 512MB, PC3200 DDR memory in slot 0.
Two Seagate barracuda 120GB 7200rpm hard disks.
Matrox G450 graphics card
My XP disk is a brand new and fully legitimate OEM copy.
And here's what I tried:
First, I tried running the install without pressing F6. If I have one
drive connected onto one of the first two IDE channels, I can go ahead
and install XP. If, however, I've activated GIGARAID in the BIOS and
created a brand new RAID-1 mirror using the two Seagate disks, one each
as the master disk on the last two IDE channels, the install will tell
me early on that it cannot find any hardware to install to.
Second, I pressed F6. When I got to the prompt asking for the
"Manufacturer-supplied hardware support disk", I checked everything
that arrived with the Gigabyte board. No disk, just CDs.
So third, I looked on the CD from another machine and found what I
presume to be the directory containing the necessary files to go on the
disk. However, do Gigabyte leave even the slightest hint of
documentation about what should be on the disk, and in one directories?
It seems, after much searching, googling and downloading the latest
version from their site for my motherboard, that the answer is a
definite No.
So, I copied what I believed to be the necessary files onto the floppy
disk. These were txtsetup.oem (which went into the root of the disk),
ITERAID as mentioned in the txtsetup.oem file, and the WIN64/
subdirectory and its contents, as also specified in the txtsetup.oem
file.
And this leads to the above results: when you insert the disk and press
enter, it simply thinks about it for a moment, visibly accesses the
floppy drive and then asks you again to insert the disk. I am somewhat
skeptical about the ability of floppy drives to function, so I went
through four different floppy drives (a good job, as two didn't work
correctly) and two different floppy disks, all of which happily seem to
read and write files on the system I've been using to prepare them.
So I have then tried altering the content of the disks: I've copied
across the other subdirectories for different Windows versions (WinXP,
Win2003, etc), which seemed pointless, I've put all the files in the
root directory, and so on. But no luck - it still does exactly the
same thing, giving no error but just simply prompting for the disk
again.
What's annoying here is that XP isn't giving me any help. It's not
saying: "I can't see the floppy drive", or "The disk is corrupt", or "I
read the disk okay but couldn't find something referred to by
txtsetup.oem" etc. If someone therefore could give me a clue as to
what might be astray here, I'd be most grateful.
I should also point out that both disks are relatively new, have been
treated carefully and shown no signs of defects, and that the computer
has also happily functioned (running UNIX-based OSes for most of the
time) for the past six months, without crashes, lockups, or anything.
So I am confident in the hardware.
Many thanks!
--
Andrew King