Adding RAID0 to Already Installed Vista x64...

[Jaxel]

So I have a computer with Vista Home Premium x64 installed on a Western Digital Raptor 150gb... this is where I want to keep Vista installed and I dont plan on changing anything to this drive. I just bought 2 new identical hard drives (WD6400AAKS) that I wish to put into my computer in a RAID0 array... these drives have nothing to do with my Vista OS Drive as Vista has already been installed and I wont be changing anything to that drive...

My motherboard is a GigaByte (GA-EP35-DS3P). In my BIOS settings, I enabled RAID and set the two drives into a RAID0 volume. However, with the RAID enabled, I cant boot into Vista... Vista starts booting and then instantly crashes. If I disable the RAID, then Vista boots normally. I figured this is because I never installed the drivers for a RAID Array when I installed Vista because I didn't have the array at that time. How do I go about installing the drivers for my RAID array now?

I tried downloading the RAID Drivers from the GigaByte website, and installing it from there, but it says my system does not meet with the minimum requirements of the installation... most likely due to the fact that my RAID controller is disabled in the BIOS. However, I cant enable the RAID controller because then I cant boot into Vista.

I dont have a Floppy Drive.

 

[RavenD]

What are you going to be using the new drives for? Unless the answer is HD Video editing, running them in raid-0 is a mistake. For storage drives, JBOD would be better. Just make the two drives into dynamic disks, and create a spanned volume out of them. At least that's how it works in XP iirc.

 

[Jaxel]

Umm... HD Video Editing...

 

[Jaxel]

I found a solution... the GigaByte MOBO has two SATA controllers, the Intel ICH9 and the GigaByte Jmicron. So what I did was move my system volume disk over to the Jmicron controller, turned the ICH9 SATA controller into RAID, then booted my system. With this, I was able to install the ICH9 raid drivers on my system volume disk. Then I moved my System Volume Disk back over to the ICH9 and now everything works great!