my name is mwd

I was left utterly, utterly exasperated today. I wanted to install Windows XP on a PC. The PC in question had a modern motherboard that supported onboard RAID, so I RAIDed two SATA drives in mirroring mode to give me some failure protection. Set up the bios, create the RAID array, and then in goes the XP installation CD.

At this point XP decides I’ve not got any hard disks. Ah well, this is a driver problem – the XP install doesn’t know about all this RAID and SATA nonsense, so it can’t proceed. Okay, how do I fix this? Well, the motherboard people have given me a CD with drives on, so I go back to the XP install program, and when it tells me I can press F6 to load third party drivers, I do so.

Oh dear, please. It asks me to load a disk into drive A:, the floppy drive. A quick look at the PC is enough to show there is no floppy drive in this PC. And even if there was, I have no floppy disks in this day and age. Hello? Do I look like I’m living in the nineties? I think not. So now I’m stuck, I can’t do anything with this high end PC running a operating system released this side of the millenium without getting an antiquated disk format!

It’s less that it wants a floppy disk that annoys me (and boy did it annoy me earlier, let me tell you), but that it accepts no other media for the drivers. Not even CD, which it can clearly understand how to read as it’s running of the bloody drive. Sorry, calm breathes, happy thoughts. Okay, that’s better. I mean, why a modern OS installer can’t cope with getting data off things like USB drives, or even another CD ROM or DVD drive I simply can’t fathom. It beggers belief. Hopefully Vista will not be so brain dead.

(ARGHHHH!)

update: It was pointed out to me that you can use a technique to modify the XP install image to add drivers to it, through a process called slipstreaming – which is a fancy name for hacking the installer by hand to add files to it. Still, this is a chicken and egg solution, as you require a working Windows install to be able to do this, so no go.