Raid on AR21M

[missmuppet]

Hi guys.
How can I set up raid on this vaio ar21m laptop. It is running xp media, and we have put 2 seagate momentus 200gb drives with 16 mb cache and 7200rpm. One drive was installed last week and has OS on it, working normally.(original drive was used as d storage. Now second momentus has been fitted but not touched as we intended to raid these and install os from recovery discs, should I mount it or something?. Original 160 gb drive is mounted in icybox with recovery partition intact, (linked via usb). According to vaio manual sent with m/c, raid 0 is default and when you enter recovery from discs you can enter raid system. This does not work. Raid system does not appear to be installed. It is not mentioned in any way in the bios. Vaio appears to use cut down bios. I have had raid installed on my tower system for the last year, so I know a bit about it - but how do I get it onto my wife's laptop? Did sony ship these without raid though the manual says installed. Any help appreciated, Thanks guys.

[Blencogo]

Hi miss muppett and welcome to Club Vaio.

I know how to do this with a Retail Version of XP but I am not sure how you would get it to work with the Recovery Media. Perhaps someone else has some experience of this? I assume the Intel Chipset supports RAID - I can't imagine Sony are using a different chipset for the AR21M and the AR21S.

You will need to install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to configure RAID during the installation process. You are obviously aware that you will need to reformat both drives as striped RAID 0.

Intel do provide a floppy disc configuration utility ver 7.6 for download in addition to the full Intel Matrix Storage Manager software ver 7.6 from here: -

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2101&OSFullName=Windows*+...

Alternatively, you will find the RAID drivers in your C:\Drivers\RAID directory or they are available for download with the AR2_Drivers.ZIP Original Driver Download from here: -

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downloads/updates/updates.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&c=0&s=VGN-AR&m=2418