I cannot install a Windows XP Professional operating system on my SATA RAID (mirror hard drive) without it crashing all the time. Sometimes it offers me the usual crash options of 'last known good configuration', the various choices of safe mode and 'start Windows normally'.
The conundrum this puts me in is this: safe mode does not support RAID drivers. It is a good thing I have a laptop I dare not monkey with, because I have to install Windows on my RAID desktop a couple of times a week - just about every time I reboot it. The machine is an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard with an Athlon 3200 processor, 1GB of Ram and half a dozen hard drives.
I have got the operating system on one SATA hard drive and I am using two more mirrored SATA drives to hold my valuable data (digital pix of my son growing up, mostly). This problem makes me want to install Windows XP on a big flash card, but I am told they are not yet big enough to hold it all. Are there smaller operating systems you can put on a flash card?
And another thing: with so many hard drives, I left one or two sterile Windows installations sitting around until I could figure out how to get at the desktops and My Documents to retrieve valuable files. I found the answer on the internet: reboot in safe mode (I only did that after giving up trying to make the RAID boot disk work), go to the directories you cannot normally access, right click, click on properties, and change ownership. So simple! Such a useless operating system.
John Ryan
Mui Wo