XPS 600 XP Reinstall, RAID Unmountable Boot Volume

Initial problems, optical drive (one CD-RW and one DVD+-RW) won't read DVD but will read CD.  Machine is a refurb not long out of the box, purchased last year but just now set up.  Also had a few other (unrelated) problems (mostly with Media Center) that I hoped a re-install of Windows might fix.

 

Start reloading WinXP MCE, not thinking about the fact that it's on a DVD - oops.  Makes it through the initial install, deletes old Windows and then won't read the DVD to reload it.  Grr.

 

Decide on a different tactic to get around the DVD issue.  I've got a legal, uninstalled copy of XP Pro on CD that I can use, so I tried that.  Oops again, can't load the RAID driver because there's no floppy, so setup can't find a drive to load Windows on.  Found instructions on the NVIDIA site to slipstream a bootable CD to get the NVIDIA RAID drivers in there.  Can't slipstream SP2 into it though, conflicts with existing SP1 on the CD. 

 

Set boot to CD in the BIOS, it does boot and during the initial setup I can see that it does load the NVIDIA RAID drivers from my custom CD.  But, when it gets to "Setup is starting Windows" (this is still on the initial text-based setup screen, no XP logo has been displayed), it stops with an Unmountable_boot_volume error.  At this point all it has done is load drivers, it hasn't prompted me to choose a location to install Windows to.

 

I have no idea what else to try at this point.  BIOS and RAID Setup utility looks right, the RAID is set to be bootable (CD still set to first boot drive with RAID as second) and it shows 'healthy' on boot before the setup starts.

 

One thing I can think of that I was unsure on when it came to making the slipstream CD - the instructions said (the file being modified in the reference is the txtsetup.sif file):

 

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c) Now add the device IDs for your SATA controller directly under the [HardwareIdsDatabase] section.

This will tell OS which drivers to load for SATA controllers on your platform.
You can get this information from the file nvraid.inf. Search for “[NVIDIA]” and you should see something like the following:

[NVIDIA]
%CK804SSS%=Crush11_Inst,PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0055&CC_0104
%CK804SSS%=Crush11_Inst,PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0054&CC_0104
%NVRAID_DESC%=nvraid,GenNvRaidDisk
%NVRAID_BUS_DESC%=nvraidbus,*_NVRAIDBUS
%NVRAID_BUS_DESC%=nvraidbus,*NVRAIDBUS


You will require an entry for each of these lines in the following format.

[HardwareIdsDatabase]
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0054 = "nvatabus"
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0055 = "nvatabus"
GenNvRaidDisk = "nvraid"
*_NVRAIDBUS = "nvraid"
*NVRAIDBUS = "nvraid"

Note: Your platform will likely have different device IDs, so you should modify
your entries accordingly.

So, my question here is, how does one find the device ID when one doesn't have a working copy of Windows installed?  I couldn't find anything in the BIOS setup that gave Device ID's, and since my nvraid.inf file (from the Dell WIN MCE reload disk, opened/read on a working machine) had the same device ID's as used in the example cited above, I also used the same ones in the [HardwareIdsDatabase] entry.  Don't know if that is causing/related to the problem or not, but it was the only thing in the boot-CD instructions that I wasn't really clear on.