PC Restore with Raid 0?

Have you performed a disk clean-up, ran a spyware program, defragmented your hard drives?

 

System restore is built into windows under accessories/system tools/system restore.  i believe your are asking to reformat your computer or use dells restore program located on the hard drive, not system restore.  Before you completely wipe out your drive , if you haven't try this:

 

Run Ad Aware and Spybot, 2 good spyware programs and they're free, google them.   With ad aware get rid of everything it finds.  With spy bot you have to be a little more selective so read the description of the item prior to fixing/deleting.  Oh, make sure you back up your registry with the spybot registry backup, it will do it for you on the setup screen.

 

As for disk clean up, open My computer/right click on your hard drive/properties/select disk cleanup.  Run cleanup and then ck all the boxes and select O.K., Note: this may take a very long time if you have never done this.

 

Defrag last,  Go to My computer/right click on your hard drive/properties/tools/defragment now.

 

If your computer does not get substantially faster let us know.

Like the original poster.  I also want to reformat my RAID 0 drives (160GB x 2).  The PC has gotten very slow and I want to clean up all the application I don't use anymore.  I have already done the following but it is still quite slow.   I also got Norton AV and I wanted to use that over McAfee as it's not a resource instensive.

 

- Deleted a bunch of old applications off my PC at the same time copied all the stuff I wanted backed up

- Ran both Adware and Spybot (Search and Destroy) on my PC.

- Did a diskclean and a finanlly defrag on my PC

 

I do have the orginally Dell Win XP installation disk (w/ SP2)  Is it as easy going into the BIOS at startup, go to the RAID setup delete/create the partition and reboot with the Win XP CD?

 

Not quite but close.  you'll have to download the raid drivers for you system from dell.  Do you have a floppy drive?

Nope, I was afraid you were going to ask that - could I copy the Intel Raid0 drivers to a CD when prompted via windows setup?

 

thanks again for your help.

What kind of computer do you have?  If it's a dell I'd request the cd's.  The raid controller drivers are usally on the cd and install with XP.  If not go to walmart/best buy etc. and pick up a usb floppy drive, there not very expensive.   There is a way you can slip stream the drivers onto a CD with the operating system but that's above my area of expertise.  Someone may post the procedure if they see this thread.

The PC is a Dell XPS Gen 5.  I got it about 1 year ago just before they released the new 400 and 600 XPS lines.  I do have restore/backup CD's that Dell made/ship to me (as we thought at one point I would need to reinstall everything on new hard drives when I first got the PC - the problem turned out to be a fault 512meg RAM stick)  I also have all the CD's Dell shipped with the system (Win XP home Edt SP2, resource CD, driver CD etc.   I did read on the forums yesterday that after 2005 they included the RAID drivers with the O/S.

If that's the case get into your bios and change your boot sequence to boot from CD (make cd # 1)and you should be good to go.  With the Operating System CD you optical drive it will start windows installation automatically.

 

here are step by step instructions:

 

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp

 

 

When you install drivers do your chipset first.

 

Update - I reformatted the hard drives(s) and re-installed Windows, AV, patches, drivers etc, everything.  PC is running great but I'm not using RAID 0 anymore - PC see's just 2 160GB HD's.  There are 2 ways of setting up a RAID 0 array.  First way is to setup the RAID configuration before you install Windows.  I tried this but even though I've got the RAID drivers on my Win XP CD - you need to have them copied to a floppy disk and install them during the Windows setup (you hit F6 to load your own 3rd party drivers - it only prompts you for a floppy disk - something I don't have anymore)  The other way to setup RAID is after  you setup Windows.  I tried to do this but I couldn't get it to work.  The Dell manual calls it "migrating" to RAID.  I downloaded and installed the Intel Matrix RAID configuration program from the Dell website.  During bootup I went into setup and turned RAID "on".  However my PC wouldn't boot after that - message was "please remove all media and hit any key to start".  Next I rebooted again and turned RAID to Autodetect.  I was now able to boot to Windows.  The next step is to go into the Intel Matrix Raid app and select the "Action" drop down command (did that ok) and select the "migration" option (that I can't do as I can't see this as a option).  So now I'm stuck.  My PC is running ok but I really want to be able to use RAID 0 again.  I followed the Dell manuals to the letter but it just doesn't work.  Thanks for any ideas anyone can provide.

The good news is your pc is running good.  If you want raid you may have to go with the usb floppy method and reinstall xp.

I do still have my old PC with a 3.5 1.44mb floppy drive.  I'll reconnect it to my new XPS and copy the RAID drivers to floppy and re-install Win XP.  Do I need to reformat my drive as well or just re-install Win XP? Boy I hope I don't have to re-format...

You can slipstream the drivers onto a disk with a free program called nLite. You can get it here if thats what you are into:  http://www.nliteos.com/

You have to insert your XP disk and load it into nLite, then you can get rid of all the extra stuff on the XP cd, insert your drivers, or what ever you need to do, and then burn your own customized install disk.

Hope this helps,

jd