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Installing Windows on drive attached to extra SATA port

I posted this incorrectly into the MacBook Pro so I have reposted here:

I have a Mac Pro with 4x500GB drives in RAID 10. Since bootcamp can't be installed on this RAID setup I took the stock apple 250GB drive and put it into an external SATA enclosure.
I have since booted to that external sata disk (by holding down the option key during boot) installed bootcamp and partitioned that drive for windows XP. So the drive now has both OSX and a partition for XP that I made via bootcamp. After that was finished I clicked the key to "install Windows now" or whatever.
The plan here is to just turn on that external drive whenever I need to run windows or install firmware updates for the Mac since apple can't seem how to do either with a software RAID set in place on the existing 4 internal drives.

After doing the above steps I now have 2 problems:
1. When booting from a XP SP2 disk to install XP the only drives seen are the 4 internal ones and not the extra sata port that is connected. This leads me to believe that I need to slipstream drivers for the extra two unused sata ports into the install disk but am not sure, I am hoping for some input.
2. Now when I power off the external SATA drive the only way I can boot back into my normal OSX RAID10 setup is by holding down the 'option' key and choosing one of the 4 RAID10 disks that are listed. After I do this it boots fine but I have to do this every time I boot my system which get really old.
If I don't hold the option key down down the system will just boot to a black screen asking me to "insert boot media". It seems like it is stuck in the bootcamp mode so I need to figure out how to get out of it.
I wonder if I can just uninstall bootcamp from the external SATA drive to fix this so that my system will boot normally? I will give this a shot tomorrow b/c I don't have time tonight but I appreciate any helpful advice.

If anyone has any ideas on how to get XP installed while running RAID please share. I know I can use an IDE drive but I have 2 optical drives installed so that is out for the moment but I may need to do that if I can't get the SATA option working.

MB Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.8), Mac Pro 2.66, 4x500GB RAID 10, 1GBx4, X1900XT MB Pro 2Ghz Dual Boot w/MCE 2005

Posted on Dec 29, 2006 5:11 AM

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4 replies

Dec 29, 2006 5:21 AM in response to Altimeter88

Altimeter

I have an almost indentical post in the Boot camp forum. Same set up, 4x500Gb striped into one array. Some one has suggested to me using the Spear IDE port in the second optical bay to connect an IDE hard drive. Haven't tryed it yet, but will give it a go.

Having read your post, what is your external drive connected to? USB or sata port? i know that there are some sata ports tucked out of sight inside. Are these what you are using?

Sprint

Dec 29, 2006 1:46 PM in response to TomM

The enclosure is usb and eSATA (external SATA) the drive is connected via a SATA cable to a SATA 3.5" adapter plate on the back of the mac pro that is connected to one of the unused extra 2 SATA ports that are tucked away behind the heatsinks on the Mac Pro's motherboard. So it is SATA all the way to the motherboard, I am not using USB at all.

As noted above, yes you can install XP on an IDE hard drive and put it into the optical bay area but I have two DVD burners installed there and would like to use the setup I have now if possible.

I was able to fix my 2nd issue listed above thanks to a suggestion in another forum of going into my startup disk options and choosing my RAID 10 setup. Now my system boots fine.

So back to the issue of installing XP on one of those extra unused SATA ports, if we can find out what brand controller those 2 ports are (intel, siig, silicon image, etc.) we could slipstream the drivers into the XP CD and then the windows install should work. Coming from a PC backgrounds and having installed various versions of windows literally at least 500+ times I have had to use the 'F6' optoin to install SATA/RAID/SCSI drivers from a floppy hundreds of times. The problem here is that we don't know what brand hardware it is or if it is possibly an issue with EFI not enabling those ports or something unless OSX boots, because booting to OSX connected to one of those extra ports works fine.

I guess I should also just ask again to be clear: You CAN'T install bootcamp on a RAID setup correct? Because I get an error everytime I try to run the bootcamp setup assistant. Geez, I wish apple would just enable the native RAID support built into the intel southbridge, that would solve the bootcamp problem, the RAID 10 setup problem where you can't setup RAID 10 via the GUI, and also the fact that you can't install any firmware updates to the box.

MB Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) Mac Pro 2.66, 4x500GB RAID 10, 1GBx4, X1900XT MB Pro 2Ghz Dual Boot w/MCE 2005

Installing Windows on drive attached to extra SATA port

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