Installing XP on Dynamic disk

[hdtvguy]

Hi! from the cold and snowy Canadian north

I dual boot on a Deskstar IDE drive with WinXP Pro - no SP1 and want to boot on my two Cheetah SCSI drives(17Gb each). After converting them to a Dynamic striped volume (17Gb) I tried to install from the CD-ROM (WInXP with SP1). Got the error message "Setup cannot install on this partition". Some searching on Microsoft revealed that the dynamic volume needs a MBR record.

So I:
1. deleted all volumes on both drives
2. created new simple volumes 1Gb in size on both drives
3. created a striped volume from the 16Gb remaining on both drives
4. used the diskpart utility command "retain" to save a MBR on both simple volumes
5. a message confirmed that retain was successful

Tried installing XP from the CD-ROM but got the same "Setup cannot install on this partition" message. Looking at the drives in Disk Management they are still labelled as Simple Dynamic and under Status indicate they are healthy but nothing to denote them being a boot partition.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[reboot]

During the boot process, hit F6 when prompted, follow the instructions on screen.
No Windows OS's will install to SCSI or dynamic drives while IDE drives are present/primary/active.

[hdtvguy]

Originally posted by reboot During the boot process, hit F6 when prompted, follow the instructions on screen. No Windows OS's will install to SCSI or dynamic drives while IDE drives are present/primary/active.

Thanks for the reply Jim. I actually get around that Windows eccentricity by telling the motherboard to boot up on the onboard SCSI controller rather than the ATA, then I turn off the primary IDE drive in the CMOS and WinNT4, W2k and XP have installed the boot.ini and NTLDR files fine on the SCSI's instead of the IDE.

When my attempts to install XP failed I surfed MS's knowledge base and it stated that W2k would properly put the MBR information in the DYNAMIC disk when you converted over from a BASIC disk, as evidenced as this was working well in W2k. However they also state that XP handles the MBR information differently and I believe that I am required to use the DISKPART utilities retain command to place that information.

However I must be missing something as XP installl still doesn't recognize my ist partiton SIMPLE VOLUMES as bootable.

Still trying to get more info on proper usage of the "retain" command.

Thanks again,
hdtvguy

[reboot]

Interesting that XP is that much diff from 2k. I would think it should just work the way you've got it...There's got to be something in the dynamic setup that's stopping it, not in the SCSI boot nor MBR. If the disks were not set up dynamic it would probably work...I know that doesn't help much.

[hdtvguy]

Well I finally found the answwer. MS says you cannot make a STRIPED volume a BOOT volume.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre..._partition.asp
The system partition can never be part of a striped volume, spanned volume, or RAID-5 volume

So just put all the Program Files on the striped drives and XP flies. I suppose I could have installed the BOOT on a second SIMPLE volume and got a basic install of XP working. Then go into my IDE installation of XP, backup the SCSI's BOOT volume and convert that to a STRIPED volume and restore the data back. Well maybe next time.

P.S. the "retain" command does work and is essential to get the XP installer to recognize the drive as an installable partition.

[KHT]

Unless I`m mistaken to have a Raid 5 via dynamic disks you need a minimum of four disks. Three for the striped volumes and one for the system.

Two disks can be used as a mirrored set.

Why not install on basic disk and convert to dynamic after the install?