Man, I spent most of Sunday trying to do this, and have so far utterly failed. I'm mondo frustrated.
Built the computer a few days ago with no hardware problems. Was a piece of cake. (See my rigs if you want.) Win 98 also went on it no sweat. Didn't load all the goodies on the system, but got the basics all up running with the latest Highpoint and Via drivers, and video drivers. Figured it was time to go to W2k, so that I wasn't too far ahead in the hardware install on the W98se side.
W2k just wouldn't load at all. It couldn't see any hard drives in my system at all, as soon as the install got far enough along for W2k to takeover from W98 in the install. Well my two drive arrays were both attached to the Highpoint controllers, one raid 0 array of two disks on the primaries, and then one backup drive on one of the highpoint slave connectors. Worked like a charm under win98se.
OK, well I read in a FAQ on Abit KT7 boards that when a situation like mine happens under Win2k sometimes you need to install on the IDE 1 or two, and then move it over to the Highpoint controllers once you've got the Highpoint drivers installed. There wasn't much more detail than that.
I had a problem though. I couldn't do the physical swap since the raid 0 obviously wasn't going to install on the ide's. And you loose everything on the drives when you first setup raid 0, so switching over one of the drive's cables wouldn't work either. So I figured set it up on the backup drive and then ghost it over to the raid 0, right?
Didn't work.
I ghosted over my C drive partition from the raid 0 to the backup's first partition just fine, and could boot into W98se just fine with that on ide1 and the bios set to boot from that drive, with the two raid drives disconnected. (I knew that Win 98 would of course see what had been drive D as drive C once it was switched to the boot drive.) So far so good.
I could then load w2k onto another partition of the backup drive (attached to the ide 1 controller) just fine. Got the via 4-in-one and Highpoint drivers, both the latest from the net, loaded just fine into W2k on that partition as well. Then reconnected the raid 0 and now it is seen just fine by W2k. Trouble is both operating systems as loaded (and boot record modified, in the case of W98) aren't on the raid 0 drive yet. Also the drive assignments under w2k are completely different than under w98se. Basically all the boot disk partitions (on the physical backup drive w2k was installed onto) come first, and then the raid 0's come second in letter order. Ok, maybe that will change when I boot from the raid 0.
So I ghost both the w98se and the w2k partitions back to the raid 0. I'm worried about drive letter assignments though. I definitely ghosted them to the first and third partitions of the raid 0 array though. The third would read as drive F under w98se. By the second try of doing this I had carefully created W2k on what read as drive F under W2k when the backup was the only attached drive (on ide1).
Nope, wouldn't work. W98 (as boot up modified) will still load just fine after it has been ghosted back to partition 1 on the raid 0. But when I choose the w2k (default) boot option, it tells me that w2k can't be found or is corrupted.
I'm pretty sure my problem is drive letter assignment jumbling.
But how do I get around it when W2k is installed on a different disk setup from the one where it has to then be copied and boot up? I.e., how do you install W2k onto a raid array which it can't recognize at all out of the box, before the Highpoint drivers are loaded???
Since I've tried doing this three different times, each from a ghost saved copy of my w98 install before it saw w2k, and it hasn't worked yet, I'm in MAJOR need of advice from someone who got it to work.
HELP!!!!
(sorry this was so long. I wanted to explain EXACTLY what I did.)
Built the computer a few days ago with no hardware problems. Was a piece of cake. (See my rigs if you want.) Win 98 also went on it no sweat. Didn't load all the goodies on the system, but got the basics all up running with the latest Highpoint and Via drivers, and video drivers. Figured it was time to go to W2k, so that I wasn't too far ahead in the hardware install on the W98se side.
W2k just wouldn't load at all. It couldn't see any hard drives in my system at all, as soon as the install got far enough along for W2k to takeover from W98 in the install. Well my two drive arrays were both attached to the Highpoint controllers, one raid 0 array of two disks on the primaries, and then one backup drive on one of the highpoint slave connectors. Worked like a charm under win98se.
OK, well I read in a FAQ on Abit KT7 boards that when a situation like mine happens under Win2k sometimes you need to install on the IDE 1 or two, and then move it over to the Highpoint controllers once you've got the Highpoint drivers installed. There wasn't much more detail than that.
I had a problem though. I couldn't do the physical swap since the raid 0 obviously wasn't going to install on the ide's. And you loose everything on the drives when you first setup raid 0, so switching over one of the drive's cables wouldn't work either. So I figured set it up on the backup drive and then ghost it over to the raid 0, right?
Didn't work.
I ghosted over my C drive partition from the raid 0 to the backup's first partition just fine, and could boot into W98se just fine with that on ide1 and the bios set to boot from that drive, with the two raid drives disconnected. (I knew that Win 98 would of course see what had been drive D as drive C once it was switched to the boot drive.) So far so good.
I could then load w2k onto another partition of the backup drive (attached to the ide 1 controller) just fine. Got the via 4-in-one and Highpoint drivers, both the latest from the net, loaded just fine into W2k on that partition as well. Then reconnected the raid 0 and now it is seen just fine by W2k. Trouble is both operating systems as loaded (and boot record modified, in the case of W98) aren't on the raid 0 drive yet. Also the drive assignments under w2k are completely different than under w98se. Basically all the boot disk partitions (on the physical backup drive w2k was installed onto) come first, and then the raid 0's come second in letter order. Ok, maybe that will change when I boot from the raid 0.
So I ghost both the w98se and the w2k partitions back to the raid 0. I'm worried about drive letter assignments though. I definitely ghosted them to the first and third partitions of the raid 0 array though. The third would read as drive F under w98se. By the second try of doing this I had carefully created W2k on what read as drive F under W2k when the backup was the only attached drive (on ide1).
Nope, wouldn't work. W98 (as boot up modified) will still load just fine after it has been ghosted back to partition 1 on the raid 0. But when I choose the w2k (default) boot option, it tells me that w2k can't be found or is corrupted.
I'm pretty sure my problem is drive letter assignment jumbling.
But how do I get around it when W2k is installed on a different disk setup from the one where it has to then be copied and boot up? I.e., how do you install W2k onto a raid array which it can't recognize at all out of the box, before the Highpoint drivers are loaded???
Since I've tried doing this three different times, each from a ghost saved copy of my w98 install before it saw w2k, and it hasn't worked yet, I'm in MAJOR need of advice from someone who got it to work.
HELP!!!!
(sorry this was so long. I wanted to explain EXACTLY what I did.)