Hello,
We would like to inform you that the DZ68BC is not designed to work with Windows* XP. The F6 driver must be loaded through a floppy drive in this specific Operating System (OS) since it is a requirement from the OS:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-008326.htm
I'm surprised to read that a Slipstreamed installation isn't working as in the end it only does the same sort of thing that providing drivers via a Floppy with F6 offers using a different approach. If you are able to borrow a *compatible* USB Floppy drive to try this as suggested by Dan, make sure it's the sort thats approved for this specific purpose as not just any old USB Floppy is suitable for XP F6 installations - there's a limited list of them and I remember seeing something on Microsofts website about it (I don't recall precisely where though sorry). Perhaps your local computer shop may have a suitable USB Floppy and can help out and do that part of things for you at a small cost?
Perhaps something associated with your multiboot/multi-array setup is responsible and it's time to go back to a basic single array setup (or at least do the XP installation first) and then try adding the newer, fully supported OS later on? Is there more than just the 'Intel(R) Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller' listed in the driver package as I've seen lot's of confusion with choosing the correct option on other posts here in the past (using different motherboards)?
I did try going back to a simpler setup, first dissolving one of the two arrays so I only had one, then even deleting the array altogether and going to just a collection of single drives, then switching the controller to AHCI mode - all with no luck. If you watch the XP Setup program, along the bottom you can see what drivers it's checking out, and I could see the "Intel(R) Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset" driver flash across the screen, but it never ID's the hardware and loaded the driver.
However, doing all that did give me an idea for a fix - or at least a workaround. Change the controller mode to IDE and vanilla XP Setup will recognize it. Install XP on a single-drive partition that way, then load the Intel drivers via the Rapid Storage EXE file. Now you have a functioning disk image for an XP system that is bootable on an array - and in my case since I had a working Win7 installation, I could boot that and use a utility to transfer the image over to the array from there (I used Norton Ghost, but any image-transfer program should work).
Then it's just a matter of setting up whatever boot manager you want. I happen to like GAG because it's simple and I like the way it hides whatever other OS partitions you have, but anything should work.
I'm still baffled by the F6 slipstream not working, since like I said I have used that technique successfully several times before on other systems, but at least I found a way that works.
P.S. XP on this thing really screams, especially if you use something like Dataram's RAMdisk to take advantage of system memory above 4G that XP cannot normally see or use. I have 16G installed, and with a 4G ramdrive setup for XP, and using the utility to keep the swapfile, temp files, and internet cache etc. on the RAMdrive, XP is surprisingly fast. If you had a full 32G installed and dedicated everything above 4G to the RAMdrive (i.e. 28G), you could theoretically copy the entire XP installation over to the RAMdrive after boot and have XP running entirely in memory - not an SSD, but raw RAM! Downside is you would have to wait longer to boot, since it would have to copy the OS to the RAMdrive every time; also, you would have to make sure you synchronized back to the HD before shutdown every time or risk losing any and all changes from the last sync. But it still might make an interesting experiment...
