Possible to update RAID drivers on a boot drive?

[Frosteh]

Is it possible to change/update RAID drivers on a system which is using a RAID 0 array for it's primary drive on which an OS is installed?

It's a sort of catch 22 situation, the drivers needed to actually correctly read the drive, are stored ON the drive itself, windows obviously has some kind of driver preloading system before It trys to start reading other files from the drive.

If you remove or try and update your RAID drives when booting off the array windows instantly crashes and the drive(s) become unbootable.

Is there some way of fixing this so you can update drives safely?

I'm curently using Vista Ultimate 32bit as my primary OS on 2x Raptor 10,000 RPM hard drives.

P.S

I don't mean to be rude, but I don't want to hear lectures about how I shouldn't be using RAID or how it's not appropriate or how it's more prone to failure or anything else like that, that's not an issue here, I simply want to learn if the above is possible, and if so how to do it.

Thanks.

[tuskenraider]

You just update the driver with a driver package .exe file or update the driver within the Device Manager and it reboots to the new driver just fine. You obviously wouldn't want to remove the driver, have to reboot and then attempt a new driver install. My guess is a BSOD, but maybe Windows would find the old ones and successfully boot, but that would negate the whole purpose of uninstalling a driver to install a new one anyway.

[Frosteh]

But the very instant the current driver is removed it's unable to read the C: drive and crashes, leaving no time to install new ones, I'm fairly sure the update driver button does a similar thing.

There must be some way of telling windows what to do when booting from a floppy disk or boot CD/DVD, although then you need to load RAID drivers into THAT environment so you can see the drive correctly.

But I have no idea how you do that.

[protias]

I would image it wouldn't take effect until next boot, but I've never used Raid 0 so I'm not entirely sure.

[drizzt81]

But the very instant the current driver is removed it's unable to read the C: drive and crashes, leaving no time to install new ones, I'm fairly sure the update driver button does a similar thing.

There must be some way of telling windows what to do when booting from a floppy disk or boot CD/DVD, although then you need to load RAID drivers into THAT environment so you can see the drive correctly.

But I have no idea how you do that.
Why do you need to uninstall the current driver? I could see windows memory caching the driver and upon reboot loading the new version.

[tuskenraider]

But the very instant the current driver is removed it's unable to read the C: drive and crashes, leaving no time to install new ones, I'm fairly sure the update driver button does a similar thing.Is this a hyposthesis or that's what is happening to you? I've personally updated RAID drivers within Windows many times with various mobo's(NF2, VIA and NF4 chipsets), it shouldn't be an issue and would be silly for MS to allow the ability to do so if it couldn't be done.

[Frosteh]

Actually it's whats happened to me under XP, I've not tried under Vista yet.

Its a good theory if it's a D: drive, or some other 2ndry drive, but when it's running the actual OS and the drivers are switched it simply fails to read from the drive the moment drivers are removed.

I don't really want to risk doing it in Vista, I've already broken my RAID in Vista a few times, one of them was for updating the raid drives by accident (I was messing with the Jmicron addon controller and it's IDE drivers and did changed the wrong adapter for SATA

It's always been a problem ever since I started using RAID, although Vista thank god comes with drivers for this chipset adn can see the RAID using its autodetect/default drivers. Still not being able to get to safe mode, or alike is still a problem.

[tuskenraider]

Well it must be chipset related or mobo related. Just for the hell of it, I just uninstalled my RAID driver for my NF4 setup and Windows rebooted, found new hardware and must of found the old drivers to use and then just asks me to reboot again to finish installing hardware.

[Frosteh]

Well it must be chipset related or mobo related. Just for the hell of it, I just uninstalled my RAID driver for my NF4 setup and Windows rebooted, found new hardware and must of found the old drivers to use and then just asks me to reboot again to finish installing hardware.

And your C: is made up of the array on the controller you reinstalled the drivers for?

Doesn't make sense to me, I can see there being no problem if it's a 2ndry drive, but if it's a primary one windows has to have access to the drivers which is on C:\windows\drivers.

How can you install driver files to C:\windows\drivers, if windows doesn't have the ability to read the C:, more to the point how can you even boot off it?

[tuskenraider]

My RAID0 array is my boot drive with XP Pro on it. I'm certainly not knowledgeable about all the underlying processes that occur when doing a driver update such as this. But as I mentioned, and I'm sure plenty of others have had the same experience as I've never seen this issue before, that I've just ran the .exe for the driver package(such as VIA Hyperion or nVidia nForce) or manually select the location of the new drivers within the Device Manager for the RAID controller if there happens to be a release of just the RAID driver and not a total package, and everything updates just fine. I can't explain the why's, but have you ever seen a warning with an updated RAID driver that says it's not installable unless it is a new installation, which would mean the driver would HAVE to be put on a floppy for an F6 install(at least up to XP) and shouldn't be included in a driver package that works only within Windows? But yet they do and they work for most. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can explain the actual workings of this. Either way, it doesn't solve your problem why you can't update like most others do. Or this is explained already:

I could see windows memory caching the driver and upon reboot loading the new version.

[Michael Daly]

If you remove or try and update your RAID drives when booting off the array windows instantly crashes and the drive(s) become unbootable.


This shouldn't be a problem. If you upgrade the driver, Windows will defer the actual installation of the new driver until you reboot. When it's rebooting, the old driver is used to read the new driver off the drive, the new driver is installed and the boot progresses.

The reason it's done during reboot is because the driver is likely locked and can't be touched while Windows is running. During reboot, only enough of Windows is loaded to do the update without locking the driver.

If it isn't locked, then it can swap the drivers while running and can do it without reading the drives during the process.

If you're having a problem, it probably is due to something other than the basic update. Windows is designed to allow software updates for all sorts of software and it isn't going to get fouled up by something simple like this.

It is possible that the new driver is installed with some option as default and it is not compatible with what your BIOS says. Some folks have had problems with IDE vs NCQ settings with Windows. For example, when installing XP Pro recently, I had to set the BIOS so that SATA was in IDE mode. Once the install was complete, I could fiddle with the settings and change the BIOS to NCQ. Windows could not install the drivers in NCQ mode.