I've been reading up on installing Vista on a RAID 1 array and my first question is; do I need to have a floppy disk ready with all the RAID controller drivers for when I've enabled RAID in the BIOS?
My second question is, is this necessary for Vista? I've found this http://www.legitreviews.com/article/454/3/ article which suggests that I can have all the necessary drivers on a USB memory stick, so i'm a little confused.
This is probably the most obvious question, but do the drives that I want to set up in RAID 1 and install the OS on need to be formatted beforehand?
Hi Paddyw01 when I first installed Vista I was going to have raid 0 and emailed Microsoft asking for their advice upon loading the raid drivers and the reply was that the drivers are installed into the operating system for modern chipsets.
You can load the drivers onto a usb stick so you do not need a floppy disc but you might find you do need nothing but to enable raid in the bios.
Formatting is needed to set up the disc ready for the operating system.
Thanks for the advice. I see where you're coming from but that's an enormous amount of different drivers (from different manufacturers) installed onto the OS. Unless i've missed your point entirely
I currently have XP, so the most logical way to have Vista on a RAID 1 array would be to buy the two hard drives, and to format them individually on XP before I use them to install Vista. Do you think this is the best and easiest way to go about it?
Hi you will need to format after the RAID is created.
In vista you can use drivers in USB sticks or CD (last not sure) on XP you will need a formated floppy.
Or... if you're feeling adventurous with XP, you can slipstream the RAID drivers in and burn yourself a new XP installation CD (amongst a bewildering number of other things like pre-configuring your setup, other drivers, SP3, MS Office, AVG or most other software).
Handy guides and free software download to help you do this:
