Well I finally found the answwer. MS says you cannot make a STRIPED volume a BOOT volume.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre..._partition.asp
The system partition can never be part of a striped volume, spanned volume, or RAID-5 volume

So just put all the Program Files on the striped drives and XP flies. I suppose I could have installed the BOOT on a second SIMPLE volume and got a basic install of XP working. Then go into my IDE installation of XP, backup the SCSI's BOOT volume and convert that to a STRIPED volume and restore the data back. Well maybe next time.

P.S. the "retain" command does work and is essential to get the XP installer to recognize the drive as an installable partition.