Gazzy

Just tried installing the Corporate version of XP on my machine (A7V133 which incorporates the Promise Fasttrak100 controller). I have two IBM 75GXP hdds in RAID0, no bad sectors. Running latest BIOS, 1005A, I tried upgrading from Windows 98SE - install died half way through, giving" unable to read data from drive C" bluescreens then crashing. Using either the CD or winnt.exe/Smartdrv DOS install trick doesn't work - set-up just won't detect the RAID array - I've tried F6 and given it the Fasttrak100 Win2k driver, and it still won't detect any partitions. Thinking I'd finally figured it out, I hooked up a spare 20gb HDD to the Via IDE controller - detected fine, but when Setup was beginning it bluescreened. Does anybody have any ideas? Really stressing me out, since there's no logical explanation. All the best, tia.

Wahey, problem solved! Someone in another forum had the exact same problem, so I shot an email off to him asking if he managed to fix it. Indeed he had, with this driver (uploaded for anybody who needs it) - http://www.gareth.dr.btinternet.co.uk/FastTrackPromise.zip. The Promise controller built into the A7Vxxx is the Promise Fasttrak100 PDC20265. Many thanks to Sirraj for the driver, lifesaver

Everything copied fine, just during startup (I remember it just setup my USB MS Intellieye Explorer with the LEDs flashing) it came up with a blue screen. Not a big fan of using yet another hard disk just to boot off; besides not having a UDMA100 drive to do the boot time/etc justice (only got a UDMA66/5400 Seagate), it's a massive waste of the disk since I won't ever bring myself to use it. Surely there's *something* going wrong since other people are fine with the RAID0 in XP using the A7V133?

Yeah I considered that too, that's why I flashed to the latest BIOS (1005A). Christ this is going my head in

I considered that too, and underclocked the CPU 133MHz and the memory to their least aggressive settings, and disable other performance tweaks that might be pushing too hard. Nothing at all I'm mystified why XP can't/won't see the RAID array at all, just incredibly annoying and strange