HELP With RAID Installation

[Ridge87701]

I have bought a new PC
Asus P5LD2-Inter 945G base Mobo (Unfortunately thats the only one available in India within my budget. Even the 946 was more than twice this, so had to settle for it)

Kingston 1 GB DDR2 667
2 160 GB SATA Barracuda Seagate
Nvidia 7300 GS (Same problem as Mobo. Other models were way expensive, only coz no one buys them)

Now, the problem I am facing is, that since the mobo didn't have a built in RAID controller, I added a PCI Raid, Silicon Image SiI3512
Unfortunately there was no disk available, so I got it anyway, hoping drivers would be available online.

Now, I have tried downloading ALL possible drivers available ANYWHERE on the internet, and they simply refuse to work.

When I F6, it says that enter the disk and keeps on saying that forever.

Now, there is a RAID utility which I get immediately after BIOS and I have tried to Create a RAID disk, and without it as well.

Does anyone has ANY IDEA what can I do?

I am sick of this now. Is RAID worth all this hassle anyway??????

GOD almighty, how I hate computers. (Only when they refuse to behave the way they're supposed to!)
And I hate Murphy even more.

HELP!!!

[Shinma]

... Is RAID worth all this hassle anyway? ...

No.
Number of members here have used RAID 0 in the past.
Most ceased to do so, due to unreliability of data integrity over the long term.

[Tuttle]

I reckon what you need is this, which is the top one from the driver choices here. Unzip all of that to a floppy and it should do the trick.

[Ridge87701]

OK, guess what.
I got pretty frustrated and installed XP without raid, by connecting one of my disks directly to mobo, bypassing the raid.

Then, XP installed and upgraded the RAID card drivers, and I copied THOSE drivers on to the floppy and it turned out... That the disk was not readable.
So I got another floppy (its so difficult to get floppies these days), and formatted that from XP. Copied the drivers on THAT disk, and when I tried to configrue RAID again from that disk after reconnecting the disks to raid, it still did not recognize the drivers.

So I reconnected the sata directly and went to XP, and guess what?
The Disk was AGAIN not readable!

It looks like that the damn floppy drive itself may be faulty.
Why else would it refuse to read a disk, which it formatted and copied not 10 minutes back?

I hadn't even taken the disk out or moved anything one bit.

Now what? Will probably go and get a new FDD.

Is there ANY WAY to bypass the floppy step and use a USB disk or a CD insted???

[Tuttle]

Only if you create an unattended setup with the drivers integrated into the CD. Trust me, the $10 on a new floppy drive is worth it not to have to research that.

They finally fixed things in Vista, which can use USB keys etc for storage drivers during setup.