This guide is intended to provide instruction on how to create a Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 install CD with slipstreamed SATA/RAID drivers. By the completion of this guide, at a minimum the reader should be able to perform a Windows XP Professional install that does not require third party SATA/RAID drivers added via a floppy drive.

This document is considered public information and may be only added to or used as reference in free or non-profit publications.

Those wishing to use this guide as reference material must contact Michael Hollinger at mike97305 at hotmail.com.

Thanks to Michael Hollinger

Cool! Thank you very much, I guess I've been unconsciously waiting for it!

thanks for this

don't know why you were waiting.....

almost all the information came from MSFN. Just check the references.
Most is a rewrite of http://greenmachine.msfnhosting.com/READING/addraid.htm , but presented in POSSIBLY an easier to read manner for people not used to editing files.

Looks like I got another page to bookmark incase someone doesn't search....

You might want to convert it to PDF for those who can't open Word documents.

EDIT: I went ahead and converted it. It's also 30K smaller as PDF.

Oh, just believe me, I indeed have my reasons.

yes very cool

Oh my! How lovely.


Very nice xper Very nice indeed.

Oh my! How lovely.


Very nice xper Very nice indeed.

just seems there should be an easier way

Good reason to stay with parallel ATA in my opinion
that, and I haven't seen real speed benefits that outweight the risks involved with raid
#1 while it's fine for people who back up their data, most homeowners wait until it's too late, and it's **** hard to retrieve data on a raid setup where a drive physically fails
#2 the extra bootup time for the raid systems is annoying, not to mention it takes system resourses for the most common raid systems. Now the real scsi cards are better than the promise controllers in this respect

It's not the manufacturer's fault that MS hasn't updated their OS in awhile. WindowsXP came out long before any of this stuff even existed.There's more to RAID than RAID 0
As someone who's had motherboards with integrated RAID for over 3 years, I think you're blowing the issue grealy out of proportion.

You have obviously never run with SATA in Raid-1 or better yet Raid-5.You obviously have no idea what your talking about. Most homeowners don't even run a Raid to begin with.
Your blowing smoke, having had a raid set up now for the last 3+ years, I haven't ever seen a slowdown during bootup due to the inclusion of the raid setup, if anything it has been faster. Not to mention I don't have to worry about losing my data since I run a Raid-1 set up. Furthermore, I have seen noticable access speed increases since switching to 7200 rpm SATA using Raid-0 and Raid-1 over my 3 yr old WD 7200 rpm PATA drives in the same exact situations in the same exact set-up, though they are minimal, there are increases. It all depends on what your using your computer for. For gaming purposes, there really isn't any need for running a raid setup, for doing such things as running a PVR or websites Raid makes a big difference. I currently use a Chaintech 7NJS-Ultra with on-board PATA/SATA raid controller built in as well as a Asus A7N-266/VM with a Promise PCI controller for my PATA drives, FWIW.

There are so many benefits of using a SATA drive, that I have often wondered why it has taken them so long to finally go this route, as the knowledge of the speed increases have been known for many years. The problem does lie with the motherboard manufacturers as they didn't anticipate for SATA to take off like it has thus they mostly added the functionality of SATA through Raid controllers, instead of making them native devices such as the PATA drives are. There are a couple of manufacturers which did choose to put the SATA drives as native devices on their motherboards, and as time goes on, you will eventually see PATA totally phased out of the motherboards as all the drives eventually switch over to SATA.

I for one, next year when I upgrade for the 10th time in as many years, fully intend on purchasing a motherboard with native SATA controllers where I woulnd't need the Raid setup, though I will have some of my SATA drives in a Raid setup, as I do now, for backups as well as PVR duties.

As far as the average homeowner goes, the average homeowner only barely know how to turn on their computers and read emails from their AOL accounts and thus wouldn't be in need of this information to begin with, as their idea of upgrading their computer is going to the local Wal-Mart or Comp-USA or the like and picking up their new $500 HP/Compaq, after their 5 year old $1500 Pentium finally craps out or can't handle the upgrade to AOL's newest version.

OK, let me clarify
I HAVE sold systems to people on the premise that raid is faster. Sorry, I was disappointed in the performance, not worth the money

As far as the boot performance, I was talking about the 3 seconds it takes to load the raid setup on cold boot, as it seems to take this time to initialize the raid setup no matter what brand it is.

So, guess it's all a matter of preference. So I like redheads

and I use the Maxtor ATA133 so yeah, it's gonna beat the WD because those are only ATA100

guess I'm an old fogy

Must be, because I dont know what crack your smoking to think Maxtor is the only manufacturer to present ATA133 (or even the first)

well, I don't use samsung for hard drives

Thats cool xper
trying to compare to my methods


Sorry I just think thats funny. I have never and I mean ever had a drive fail, is it the manufacturer and or type or this bogus crud they trying to sell or promote? My first drive I ever personally had is still in use and has been formatted probably over 200 times including low level, its a Seagate. shhhh don't tell my inlaws
Only drives I ever had problems with were Maxtor btw

Consider yourself lucky. I've personally had 4 drives die on me, all within the last 5 years or so.

ok, great, just done all that is mentioned in the word doc, went to burn it and its bigger than a CD, the files to be burned are about 815MB in total

can you tell me where ive gone wrong on this, and please try and keep it simple for me, im new to all this slipstreaming stuff


thanks

@ Sandman, you have probably included some files, which are not needed - but we cant see which ones, so create a seperate thread - more people will see it that way and also describe fully what is in your drivers folder.

To Xper , just to say a quick thankyou on the guide, I found it so easy to follow - and thought you deserved alot of praise as you have put in alot of effort to make the guide. which is also like I said, very clear and easy to follow.

So thanks mate

bullcrap...

maximur real read/write speed on those disks is around 20-25MB/s

so the difference between ata100 and ata133 is obsolete.

plus the maxtor drivers have the highest rate of suddenly crapping out on you.

... let me start by saying ... sorry. I didn't mean to post this rant type post.

but ... I had to register on this forum just to reply to this lunacy.

Of course not. We're geeks we don't do things the easy way.



I just don't know where to start with this. I actually don't know if i can reply with out getting out of control. Where did you ... no ... how on earth could you ... no ... good god man what the ... no ... what tests did you run ... ah, ffs. SATA + raid not faster than ata. <sigh> i have 2 sata drives in raid1 that on there own had better data read ( not sustained ) than my SCSI 160 drive.

You sold PC's at future shop, didn't you.

greenmachine works also fine without step 3 and 4

Just wanted to say thanks for the Doc. Looks really good - even if all you did was re-wright it. I haven't had the time to actualy test it, but I have already successfuly made my own Unattended Slipsteamed CD of Windows XP Pro W/ SP2. (Works Great, Good Time Saver).

And just for the Record, I love Maxtor. WD Second. And YES! - SATA Has Better Performance.

(Man, stupid people theses days.... )

Yes!!! That's what I'm Talking about... .

Finnaly someone else that knows what I'm talking about.

whats with the textmode folder? isn't that the easiest way?

It's easier to do it the way the .doc file describes. I've always slipstreamed my (E)IDE/SATA drivers that way since finding these forums but it DOES work. I use recovery tools like O&O BlueCon and I honestly don't know how they would react to a textmode folder with stuff jammed in it.

As to the IDE/SATA issue...WTF...Of course it's faster. Do a little reading and compare the two. I myself personally don't use raid arrays. I do use SATA drives for everyday use. About the only action my IDE drives see these days is for archival, general storage and disk imaging. I'll be so glad when all the old stuff is finally laid to rest.

@maxXPsoft



I used to work at a PC wholesalers in UK, (fairly small firm with a turnover of GBP16M) as a test engineer on the customer returns dept and let me tell you we used to get a min of 25-30 hard disks physically fail a WEEK.

@et al

Yes we did get more Maxtors back than anything else, very closely followed by Hitachi, then Samsung, then IBM (although to be fair IBM tended to fail in whole batches - does this make 'em ok then?!).
1. Western Digital and 2. Seagate (in that order) are the most reliable IMHO.

i like Hitachi. Sure I run the risk of them failing, but they have a 3 year warranty compared to the 1 year most others have. If I keep things backup, I don't really care that it fails, I have a few spares in the closet ready to go with WIndows installed and everything just to put it in the system.

So it looks like my stuff is getting "republished." Fine with me, thanks for the credit.

@Alanoll

My last post wasn't meant to be the ultimate buyers' guide for purchasing harddisks! Go with what you're confident with. It was just a report of the facts in my personal experience of harddisk failures. It wasn't a scientific experiment and results from other wholesalers may be different.
I think its a very classic case of you get what you pay for. The results virtually mimic the value.

Western Digital has gotten extremely weird about their warranties. Retail drives, unless they are raptors are all 1 year. Only OEM JB SE drives have 3 years. Its better to stick with Seagtes they all have 5 years now no matter what. I perfer a company who sticks by their products for 5 years not fuss or fine print. I just got a 400GB its smoking fast.

I was quite impressed when my Hitachi failed....(i dropped it). I returned it under warranty, and the replacement was back in 1.5 weeks.

Thanks to Michael Hollinger and xper!!! All my problems are solved.

I created a Windows XP Pro w/SP2 and other updates a while back ago when only when SP1 was out... Burned it to a CD, and it has been serving me without any problems for a long time now....

That all changed when I bought my dad a new MB. An "Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe" that is. Windows could not detect the "Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATA/Raid Controller" upon a fresh install. And since I was using a Simi-Unintended version of Windows, the F6 key does not work. Thanks to the "winnt.sif" file. (I noticed that if I removed that file setup would continue fine, but then windows was not an Unintended Installation any more), Farther more I don't really know why this happens, (Lack of coding on Microsoft's part, or just the way I did it I guess.)

However the MSFN Unattended Guide, (http://unattended.msfn.org/index.htm), does warn you that the F6 key won't work when using this method.

After 3 days of Google reading half the internet, I came to the conclusion that basically Windows will only seem to recognize the SATA Controller if it is not part of the PCI bus chip or preprogrammed into the board - that way Windows Setup will see it. If you wondering how come Windows Setup always seems to find the SATA Controller on a Intel board it is because most Intel MB have the SATA on a separate controller. Or something like this anyway. I don't remember all the facts now. (Sorry my small brain is overloaded at the moment. EDIT: I will post new info). The whole point is Windows Setup will not detect your Hard drive based on there is no driver for it.

With this guide I Slipstreamed the necessary drivers needed. Now I can still have my Unintended version of windows and it still works my other computer since Windows Automatically determines the correct drivers for my Controller!

Thanks for the Guide and all the hell you went through testing it!!!

(Sorry for the long reply)

I don't know what specific guide you have been using but I've been using this guide for a long time now and with succes I might add. (and I also have a A7N8X-E Deluxe)

So basicly all you have to do is adding the following things to your TXTSETUP.SIF as you can see @ nforcershq.com

Thanks for the tip.

But what do you mean by which guide? I used the one by Michael Hollinger, Posted by xper!

Ok, i've been reading these threads for several days now, I want to slipstream my 3 mobo SATA drivers (Fasttrak, iastor & viamraid.sys) to an unattended disc.
When making a regular XPSP2 Unat CD it works just great
The problem comes when trying to do it to a MultiBoot DVD!
I've seen this problem posted several times within the board, but there's no 'real' answer for this yet. The problem I have is "xxxxxx.sys cannot be found" message.
What I did was to copy all the .sys files to the boot directories of each distribution, now a new message appears: "xxxxxx.sys is damaged", (or corrupt, i don't know the exact translation for "dañado" from spanish).
Conclusion: I can't get this method to work with a multiboot DVD.
Has anyone found an answer for this yet?

nice guide.

but this won´t work for me and my intel ich6 raid system

what can i do now??

I don't understand why it won't work....use the " Unattended " winnt.sif file setup along with the OEM folder and the guide. Please explain more...

This is very Helpful...... Thanks

This is just what I was looking for, thanks for the post

could somebody please write instructions for the nvidia raid integration?

i've been trying but i think i'm just crap

I'm glad everyone's been getting so much use from my guide - thanks for the emailed success stories! This guide has been translated into Russian, reached eMule, and probably other locations I don't even know about.

However, some folks have had problems with my clarity, or there have been a few steps that are hard to visualize. Thinking about all the 'coasters' I made trying to write the guide, I agree! With that in mind, I have created a new guide

If anyone could get me some webspace, I would happily upload it (1.34MB pdf due to color in-document pictures). I would host it myself, but I am afraid my poor Frankensteined PIII 700 on my home cable connection wouldn't appreciate much traffic (and my housemates would definitely be after me if their gaming suffered )

Please contact me at mike97305@hotmail.com if you would be willing to host!

I have had one other person approach me about having problems with this. After reading the new guide, he seemed to be OK or decided I didn't have the answer...

I don't remember the details, but I do agree that it was... odd. Hopefully, Longhorn/Vista will solve things for good!

BTW, for those interested, you may want to consider a Tyan motherboard for your next purchase - apparently their onboard RAID 'fakes' a PATA drive during Windows installation!

Got a question about this....when i copy my windows install from cd to my hard drive for integrating the raid driver, can i copy my Unattended CD install to the hard drive, integrate my raid driver, then burn it back to cd, and it will still be UA and have the drivers installed without asking for the floppy disk?

hum de hum...anyone care to answer?

From what it sounds like you are doing, things should be just fine. Adding RAID drivers and Unattended Install should not conflict - all you are doing is making the setup disc "more aware" of drivers.

ATTENTION

I decided to host the file out of the goodness of my heart *yay me*

please be gentle on my server


Here is the guide (version 2)