F6'ing the WinXP Installation w/o floppy

About the year 2000 I had a PC that had a ATA RAID Controller and I had only one hard drive. I still had to use a floppy disk to install the drivers. I admit I am not too familiar with RAID technology, but I had seen this before, so I wasn't too surprised.

geoscomp:

I have already destroyed the ISO without the slipstreamed drivers, but I will burn it again, disable bios and see what happanes. I really don't think I need it anyway since I have only one hard drive. Am I correct? Is there any reason to have RAID if you have only one hard drive? And regarding the Tablet PC Edition being a "greater" proffesional, I used my OEM recovery CD, so I am hoping that the extended services will be ther, unless they were in the "PRELOAD" directory. We will see.

It is probably just a SATA controller that is RAID capable. I know my NVidia controller on my motherboard can be set up with RAID using the controller set up or after Windows installed. But, yes you do need at least 2 hard drives in order to make a RAID.

Peshek, you don't have to have a BIOS that supports booting from a floppy in order to load a drive controller. If your computer's BIOS can detect an USB diskette drive, Windows Setup should be able to load a driver for your controller. Boot options don't matter.

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Originally Posted by slgrieb

Peshek, you don't have to have a BIOS that supports booting from a floppy in order to load a drive controller. If your computer's BIOS can detect an USB diskette drive, Windows Setup should be able to load a driver for your controller. Boot options don't matter.

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Hehe. I know. I just mentioned that because of what Ferrit asked earlier.

Have you ever looked at nLite?

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4324.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by street1

Have you ever looked at nLite?

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4324.html

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Wow...I haven't posted here for quite some time now :_)

street1: Thanks for the tip about nLite. I used it and it worked pretty good, but apparently WinXP SP2 is not sufficient to run my laptop/tablet convertible. In the end, I stayed with the crappy OEM version and I uninstalled what I didn't want. Even took the time to remove strain registry keys and directories so I am in pretty good shape now :_). It took me a while, but it is done.

I did a DriveXML back up yesterday, so even if something goes bad, I have a pretty easy job of restoring things back to normal.

Thanks to all for the help!

Hello Peshek! Very interesting to read how this all turned out! Drive controllers can be stranger than they should be. One of my spare computers has a Promise FastTrack Tx2 RAID controller (even though the machine has only a single drive connected to it at present) and the controller wouldn't let me access the drive until I configured it as a 1+0 Span RAID array!

Hehe. I hear you slgrieb. I recently noticed that the Recovery CD installs a program called "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" - a RAID controller. Don't mind the fact that I have only one hard disk and is absolutely useless to me, except if i wanted to slow down my machine a little bit :). AND there was a process in the start up tree that was supposed to let me know if an error occured with the RAID operation. WoW! How helpful would that be for me?!? :grin:


I haven't had the time to try it, but I am pretty sure that I can safely remove that garbage and still run my machine as normal. What do you think? And if you in fact believe so too, what should I back up if something goes bad hehe. You never know.

Thanks.