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

[dumdum]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p.../multiboot.asp

Hope that helps you!

[dumdum]

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q306559

This too!

[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.

[ESALADUANE]

Some more reading:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;283421