Ghost partition to RAID?

since i dont have a floppy drive and cant seem to get my RAID to work with a fresh install of windows, i decided to get Norton Ghost and move my OS / app partition to my RAID.

will this actually be a true RAID (hardware level) or am i just wasting my efforts?

ok i tried booting up from the RAID and it said:

"NTLDR missing"
ctrl-alt-del to reboot

NTLDR is the loader for Windows that helps it boot. This is missing because I don't believe you can ghost the boot sector of a hard drive. You'd have to install Windows clean and ghost over your old copy. Since that is out of the question, I'm not sure what you could do.

Oh, just found this. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/NTLDR.html

hmm.... make a boot CD, have that in it, and then it should work?

too bad i reformatted it when it messed up haha

I suppose you could try. Or download the raid drivers and burn them onto a cd. You could swap CD's when installing windows to read your raid drivers and then reinsert the XP installation CD. Or if you have two CD drives, even better.

Not going to work. When installing Windows to a RAID array using the softRAID IDE controllers built into most motherboards and PCI cards, it is a necessary step during initial setup to hit "F6" to install additional hard drive controller support. Windows does not include these drivers by default (as it does with some true SCSI RAID controllers). These drivers provide low-level hardware support to get Windows installed, with additional OS-level support often installed upon first OS load (ever get the mandatory reboot required to install additional drivers as soon as Windows loads the first time? This is why.). Applying your ghosted image to a physical RAID array determined by the controller BIOS still does not allow the OS itself see this from an operating level. Windows simply does not know what it is - there are no drivers installed for it. NT Loader is not being found because MBR and OS are unable to locate the logical drive (which is why the OS level drivers are needed).

I also do believe you're going to have to get a floppy drive. As far as I know, the Windows setup does not allow loading third-party hardware drivers from a CD-ROM. XP may, but I'm almost positive it uses the same installation routine as Win2K and these drivers had to be installed from a floppy (a USB thumbdrive may be able to do this if it is allowed floppy drive emulation).