installing SATA RAID PCI CARD

[Prolynks]

Hello,
i am installing a Sata Raid 1 controller PCI card on a newly purchased Dell E310, i am going to remove orignal hard drive with os on it and install two new identical 80gb hard drives connected to raid pci card. this is my first time installation, so i have lots of doubts.
1) do i have to have floppy drive in order to install this pci card? if yes can it be external usb floppy drive ?
2) Is it automatically going to install xp on both of the hard drives?

as you can tell i am very confused about this issue>>
please help

 

[clubsceneuk2]

Im relativly new to raid myself however you will have to create a floppy disk in order to install the raid PCI card during the windows install or it will not detect that it is there. Also raid 1 mirrors one hard drive against another but im not too sure of it mirrors the opperating system. The attached link is a friends site and may be able to help you. Please ignore the fact that he uses windows 2003 server.

http://www.simpsonuk.co.uk/tutorials/domains/create2003domain/introduction/raidyourserver/index.htm

Hope this is of some use.

 

[wahnula]

Typically you make your driver disk (follow the RAID card's documentation), assemble your array (RAID 1 recommended) in RAID BIOS, load the OS & press F6 early on. Windows will load drivers from floppy, I believe a USB floppy will work if it is recognized as a floppy in BIOS.

If not new floppy drives cost around $6 and it would be worth it to own one even for temporary uses such as this or ASR.

Tony