2 Win XP in different Harddrives?

[Carbonlung]

I have 2 160gig SATA maxtor drives and one IDE 80gig maxtor drive. Right now I'm booting off the 80gig drive. I had issues with the 2 160gig drives before.

My rig originally only had the 2 Sata 160gig drives, had XP on it but one day. I could not boot to windows, something about Isass.exe missing. I gave up and bought an 80gig HD hoping to save some data off my 2 160gigs drives. Well, I lost my data anyway and had to start over again.

Well I would still like to utilize my 2 160gigs bring it back to raid 0 array and install XP on the raid (to use as the main boot drive) and use the 80gig as a back up drive. Would that in anyway interfere with the 80gig drive which already has XP on it? thanks in advance.

[nikhsub1]

Not at all. The likely reason your raid0 array got hosed is because SATA drives are very sensitive in regards to the PCI bus, you must make sure it is run at 33mhz. Anyway, I would disconnect the 80gig drive when installing the OS on the raid array.

[Carbonlung]

Thank for the reply. With your answer comes another question :). Do I need to unplug the 80gig indifinitely while the Raid 0 function as the main boot drive or replug the 80gig after the O.S. installation?

I had issues with the raid right after the very first boot of my machine. Intel's raid bios had a hard time recognizing the raid array. Then only way I could boot up is to start and restart until the harddrives are recognize. I thought the problem was on controller end.

I replaced the power connectors and now everything seems to be fine. I'm using the power connectors that came with motherboard instead of the one from the PSU. I still dont trust the controller though. I guess I'll find out when I install the O.S. on the raid array. Thanks for the reply again