Now you install your operating system. We will base our examples on Windows XP. We are assuming that you already know how to install an operating system, as this subject is way beyond the scope of the present tutorial. In general terms, you need to enable boot from your optical drive on the motherboard setup, insert the OS CD-ROM in your optical drive, and turn on your computer.

The problem is that Windows XP doesn’t automatically recognize RAID systems, so it will think that your computer has no hard disk drives installed.

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Figure 15: Windows XP thinks your system doesn’t have any hard disk drives

You need to generate a floppy disk containing the RAID controller driver. Motherboards used to come with this disk in the past, but nowadays you will have to create it by yourself, running a small utility present on the CD-ROM that comes with your motherboard or add-on RAID controller. This utility will be located on a directory called RAID or similar. Don’t be afraid of browsing this CD on another computer until you find the utility.

On the CD-ROM that came with our motherboard, the file name was “f6flpy32_STOR_5.5.0.1035_PV.zip,” for example. It was just a matter of unzipping it and running the .exe file that was created. The utility asked us to insert a floppy disk in the disk drive and created the necessary floppy.

If you don’t have the motherboard CD-ROM anymore, you can download this utility from the motherboard manufacturer website or from the chipset (or RAID controller) manufacturer website.

As soon as Windows XP CD-ROM starts loading, you will see a message saying “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver….” When this message appears, press the F6 key and insert the floppy disk in the floppy disk drive and wait for the screen shown in Figure 17 to appear.

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Figure 16: Press the F6 key as soon as this message appears

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Figure 17: Windows didn’t locate the RAID driver by itself