So, I'm installing a shiny new system for a friend, a shuttle SN25P. Very flash video card, loads of ram, and two 250GB SATA drives in striped raid configuration for maximum speed. And there's the problem.

There is NO WAY, as far as I can tell, to install windows 2000 (that's what he wants, and before anyone says anything, XP is the same) on a bootable raid array without a real, old-fashioned, floppy drive plugged into the machine.

No, you can't use a USB floppy. It fools you into thinking you can, in that it will in the first stage locate and allow you to indicate which files will be used later, but after spending two hours formatting the raid drives it hangs trying to access a non-existant FD.

No, you can't use a CD, USB key, or any other 21st century storage medium.

No, it doesn't give any error AT ALL when it fails to read the files.

So I have to go into the loft, poke around for half an hour to find an old 3.5 inch drive, then set up a separate PSU on the bench because the cables in the machine don't reach, and I really don't want to take it to pieces yet again. And anyway, there aren't any spare outputs as the graphics card and cdrom have used them so there's no place for the 5 inch to 3.5 inch power adapter to be connected.

Then, of course, I have to screw around with the bios to turn back on the floppy drive controller I'd turned off to make the USB drive work

God, I hate windows.

Anyway, I needed to share that. Thanks for listening.

pca