Need a little RAID setup help...

Dew itt right

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Oct 28, 2005
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My system is in the sig except the Velociraptor got cloned to my 500Gb Seagate drive and I'm currently running off that. So yesterday my two WD Caviar Black drives come in and I want to stripe them.

1st attempt: I went into the BIOS and switched the SATA mode from IDE to RAID, rebooted, and went into the RAID BIOS to build the array. That went fine to I went back to reboot from the Seagate so i could clone it onto the new RAID array. But it starts loading and blue screens telling me I have a corrupt disk. But if I switch the SATA mode back to IDE it boots fine. I'll also note that there's no place I could find to set individual SATA channels to RAID and non-RAID.

2nd attempt: I set SATA back to IDE mode and booted from the single drive. I wanted to setup the RAID array through the Intel Matrix Storage Manager but it will not install! Partly through the installation a window pops up telling me my system does not meet the requirements for the software.

3rd attempt: Then I figured I go into the device manager and format the drives there and build the array. Again, partly through the process it tells me I can't do it.

4th attempt: Finally I thought I'd just boot from the Acronis CD and clone the drives there. It booted from the CD fine but when I went to clone the drives it told me Acronis couldn't find any disk drives! Realizing I still had the SATA mode set to IDE, I rebooted and set SATA to RAID. After that, it refuses to boot from the CD telling me there's a configuration error on the CD.

I'm about ready to rip my hair out! I always use onboard RAID and have had other P45 boards with excellent Intel RAID arrays but this one refuses to take. I tested both drives and everything checks out fine. It seems to me to be a problem with the motherboard or more specifically the RAID controller. If I can't figure it out I'll try removing the single drive, setting up the array in the BIOS and seeing if Vista will install on it. Any suggestions?
 
In your 1st attempt, is it trying to boot from your new RAID partition rather than your Seagate drive?
 
No, I set the boot priority to the seagate drive. It'll get to the Vista loading screen but BSOD's after a couple seconds.
 
From my past experience, you can't change from IDE to RAID in the BIOS w/out reinstalling the OS from scratch.

I have the same problem as you.

1. BIOS: SATA set to IDE
2. Install Vista and all hotfixes
3. Install all device drivers
4. BIOS: SATA set to RAID
5. Reboot to Vista
6. Blue screen.

I haven't tried from RAID to IDE or ACPI.

What works for me is to set to RAID BEFORE you start the installation of Vista and don't change it afterward.

As for configuring the SATA ports to which one is RAID and which is not, unless your BIOS is disabling the display of 3rd party setup, you should see a screen that tells you to press CTRL+I to enter the controller setup for RAID configuration.

From there, you can specify each port configurations as RAID or not and the type of RAID.
 
I think you're right about installing then switching SATA modes. I'l lprobably end up reinstalling Vista tonight.

In the RAID BIOS (Ctrl+I), the Seagate is setup at a "non-RAID disk". I was referring to some BIOS's that allow you set SATA ports as RAID and SATA. This is probably why it's never been a problem before. After I reinstall Vista to the RAID array, I should be able to clone it to the single disk again for backup purposes. As long as this holds true I'll be fine (just inconvenienced).
 
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