Almost no response from windows 7..angry wife

Does this still have anything to do with the original thread?

WindowsStar said:

Keiichi25 said:

masplin said:

That's the issue in the BIOS there is no choice to go from RAID to ACHI only Auto Detect RAID/ATA. I have just found a post elsehwere where someone said that the XPS 720 chipset was to oold for ACHI. Is that why it doesn't show up or are there some drivers that need installing?

I am pretty confident there is no reason to keep the RAID0 for this pc and seperate drives would be more useful.

While you could also do Raid 5 to cover all 4 drives (3 striped, 1 parity), performance suffers in that designation.

Respectfully: Simply not true. Many servers come with only 4 drive bays and RAID 5 is the default setup per the manufacture. I have used RAID 5 on 4 drives many times and it works perfectly with no performance hit. In fact is much faster than RAID 10. Because the machine is not mirroring and stripping at the same time. -WS

Actually, you are incorrect...

Servers will come with varying drive cages... In the case of the OP, he is speaking of a Dell XPS 430, which is NOT a server, but a desktop computer. If it is similar to the XPS 720, Dell has only allotted 4 physical internal bays to put 4 3.5" drives

Of the servers I have seen, current Servers will do a minimum of 2 drive bays (1U Rack mounted units). I have seen some servers that will go up to 8 SAS 2.5" drives on a 2U based rack system and could go up to about 16 if need be. When I specified the setup for the user, he would be able to do a maximum of 4 drives.

As for no performance hit, perhaps for a desktop. However, I have seen in an exchange environment where having a RAID 5 setup with 4 SAS disks were hammered and causing serious performance hit that it was highly recommended to do a RAID 10 setup to improve disk performance on a busy machine.

Depending on how crazy someone wants to be on performance, there is differences on a RAID 5 configuration and a RAID 10 configuration, and it depends mostly on how badly you need to do disk access.

Unfortunately it wont install Windows. Here are steps I have taken:

1. Reset CMOS
2. Restarted and reset time all fine
3. Changed boot order to CDDVD, HD#3, RAID
4. Put Windows 7 Prp 64 bit upgrade disc in drive, shut down and disconnected RAID drives
5. Started up and installation loads up
6. Shift F10 to Optimise the HD as per the tutorial. All went to plan and created a 100GB primary partition (small error in tutorial as syntax is create partition primary size=102400)
7. Went back to installation and set it off installing.
8. Then error: Windows cannot install required files. Make sure all files for installation are available and restart. Error code 0x80070001.

Any suggestions?

For clarity I am installing on a drive that has never been part of RAID and was used for backup only. I have not tounched the RAID drives except physically disconencting thme and moving them down the boot order. Also to reiterate this is an UPGRADE disc as pc was shipped with Vista 32 bit.

Where did you get Win7? Did you burn it yourself? If so, burn another DVD at 4x speed with ImgBurn.

What is the SATA controller setting now in BIOS setup?

No it's an official microsoft upgrade disc. Same one I used when upgrading from Vista.

I left the SATA controller to RAID on so maybe that is the problem?

I was assuming with only one HD attached the RAID ON = AHCI from the info I found yesterday.

What are the other choices now?

You want to try AHCI, SATA or IDE in that order.