How to install XP one of extra SATA ports?

[Altimeter88]

I have a Mac Pro with 4x500GB drives in RAID 10. Since bootcamp can't be installed on this RAID setup I took the stock apple 250GB drive and put it into an external SATA enclosure.
I have since booted to that external sata disk (by holding down the option key during boot) installed bootcamp and partitioned that drive for windows XP. So the drive now has both OSX and a partition for XP that I made via bootcamp. After that was finished I clicked the key to "install Windows now" or whatever.
The plan here is to just turn on that external drive whenever I need to run windows or install firmware updates for the Mac since apple can't seem how to do either with a software RAID set in place on the existing 4 internal drives.

After doing the above steps I now have 2 problems:
1. When booting from a XP SP2 disk to install XP the only drives seen are the 4 internal ones and not the extra sata port that is connected. This leads me to believe that I need to slipstream drivers for the extra two unused sata ports into the install disk but am not sure, I am hoping for some input.
2. Now when I power off the external SATA drive the only way I can boot back into my normal OSX RAID10 setup is by holding down the 'option' key and choosing one of the 4 RAID10 disks that are listed. After I do this it boots fine but I have to do this every time I boot my system which get really old.
If I don't hold the option key down down the system will just boot to a black screen asking me to "insert boot media". It seems like it is stuck in the bootcamp mode so I need to figure out how to get out of it.
I wonder if I can just uninstall bootcamp from the external SATA drive to fix this so that my system will boot normally? I will give this a shot tomorrow b/c I don't have time tonight but I appreciate any helpful advice.

If anyone has any ideas on how to get XP installed while running RAID please share. I know I can use an IDE drive but I have 2 optical drives installed so that is out for the moment but I may need to do that if I can't get the SATA option working.

Specs:
Mac OS X (10.4.8) Mac Pro 2.66, 4x500GB RAID 10, 1GBx4, X1900XT MB

 

[tyr2]

1. When booting from a XP SP2 disk to install XP the only drives seen are the 4 internal ones and not the extra sata port that is connected. This leads me to believe that I need to slipstream drivers for the extra two unused sata ports into the install disk but am not sure, I am hoping for some input.

Windows can't see the 'extra' internal SATA ports. I'm not sure why but I've not heard of anyone getting them working. I'd love to hear it if someone has.

2. Now when I power off the external SATA drive the only way I can boot back into my normal OSX RAID10 setup is by holding down the 'option' key and choosing one of the 4 RAID10 disks that are listed. After I do this it boots fine but I have to do this every time I boot my system which get really old.

Reselect your OSX volume in 'startup disk' in system preferences, then select reboot. This should fix the problem, it worked for me when I ran into the same difficulty.

To get things working in your situation you could move one of your OSX disks into the external enclosure and use one of the internal disks for Windows. Make sure you don't power up with it turned off tho obviously.

Alternatively, as you stated, an IDE drive might be the easiest option.

 

[Altimeter88]

Reselect your OSX volume in 'startup disk' in system preferences, then select reboot. This should fix the problem, it worked for me when I ran into the same difficulty.

Alternatively, as you stated, an IDE drive might be the easiest option.

I am pretty sure if we could find out the brand of controller for the extra 2 ports we could get the windows drivers and slipstream them into a disk. It is likely not the intel southbridge controlled SATA ports because those ports do show up. It could be a silicon image or something but that would take a lot of time to test all the options out there and make a slipstream for each one. I guess a slipstream could be made with all the main ones. Hmm I just might try that.

Anyway I don't want to go the IDE route because I have 2 optical drives installed. Thanks for the tips though.