HELP

Soldato
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Right guys,

Need some help.

Ive just got the copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. But i want to setup my system in Raid 0.

I have 1 SSD for my Operating System, however i have 2 x 2TB Samsungs. I want to Raid0 these and have 4 TB in total. However my mother board isnt letting me and my harddrives dont pop up once im into windows.

I have formatted them and one of the hard drives has had 100mb stolen from it for a partition i can't remove nor can i format?!?!?!

MY mother board is the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R with i7 OC'd by Overclockers to 4.0ghz.

Can anyone help me get these harddrives into Raid 0 please and help them show properly in windows 7?

MY Harddrives are plugged into Master & Slave Ports 5 if thats a problem?

Its just these two are the Sata 3.0
 
Did you go into the Intel Matrix* during boot (ctrl I) and setup which disc you want setting up.

* Can not remember the actual name, been a while since I setup Raid.
 
I'm sure you're aware of this, but raid 0 for storage drives is a bad idea. The performance improvement doesn't matter so much when it's not the OS drive but the increased risk of data loss sucks if there's 4tb of data involved. If you've got backups and don't really mind if one of the drives fails then fair enough.

If windows has butchered the formatting, you can boot from a gparted livecd and delete any partitions you like. Gparted probably wont cope with the raid though, so blank the drives first, then ctrl & i during boot.

You probably need to set an option the bios to raid, rather than ahci or ide. It's the forth tab down if it's similar to my UD5. I'm not sure about this, but it seems likely.

Finally good luck, I spent a while trying to boot from a raptor with some drives in raid 5, and I couldn't persuade my P45 to boot from the not raided drive. It insisted on booting from the raid.
 
If you don't raid them, most likely explanation is that you need to format them before they show in my computer. If they're not showing up in disk management. then does the bios detect them?

I've no idea why windows would steal some of one of them but it doesn't surprise me too much, I tend to format everything using gparted.
 
Still waiting on you to let us know if they show up in disk management (right click computer in the start menu, choose manage) or in the bios. Or if gparted detects them as normal.
 
Right, i have RAID 0 them. However.... my SSD isnt appearing in the bios now...

I have swapped the SATA cables with ones i know are working, i have changed the power connecters etc and still nothing.

IS it goosed?

Does it need to be ina specific SATA slot?
 
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So you now have the drives successfully raided, and showing up in windows as a 4gb volume?

If the ssd was showing up in windows before and isn't now it suggests an issue with settings rather than with the drive. It should be working fine in any port. Have you set the bios to "raid" prior to setting up the raid 0, or is it in ahci?

It is possible that your system will refuse to boot from a non-raid volume when it has a raid assembled. That you've put a raid together suggests your drives are now showing up fine in windows, so tearing down the array, going back to ide mode and installing windows on the OS is probably the best course of action.
 
1) seems the boot order has changed.
2) Did you have win 7 on one of the samsungs prior to ssd boot drive?

If yes, unraid them, going into windows then admin tools and delete the partitions of the drive. then do a quick format. and re-try, making sure the sammys are not the boot drives.


If that works, admin tools. create the 2tb partition, quick format, sorted.
 
Right,

I think ive given you guys the wrong information.

I swapped the ports over from the two Samsungs. I placed them in the SATA ports that my SSD and DVD Drive were in. They then were placed into the other ports the Samsungs were in. I switched my PC on, went into the BIOS and my SSD wasnt showing.....?!?!?!

I went into the Raid Config and Raid 0'd the Samsungs. Windows 7 only showed 2TB of the 4TB when installed... :confused:

I then deactivated the RAID and had the Hard Drives Seperate....and installed windows.... Still no SSD in Windows nor in BIOS. IDE mode is active at the moment on the DVD and SSD port...

I have tried changing ports, placing the SSD in the original port and changed the power connecter with know working ones, but still nothing.
 
I'm not sure about your board, but, I would put the ssd and dvd onto sata port 1 and 2 as per manual.

then 3 and four for the samsungs. reset the cmos. Back into bios and check that the ssd is there, by selecting first boot device. Sometime when using raid/achi, the drives don't show up until you select the first hd boot.

Once you get that working, I wouldn't raid the samsungs. Just use then as two 2tb.
The one that has lost space, could be due to having winows 7 on in the past?. All you need to do, is goto admins tool and delete the partition of the bad hd. reselect it, then a quick format

LOl, maybe I'm still reading it wrong, but thats what I would do.
 
Right,

I think ive given you guys the wrong information.

I swapped the ports over from the two Samsungs. I placed them in the SATA ports that my SSD and DVD Drive were in. They then were placed into the other ports the Samsungs were in. I switched my PC on, went into the BIOS and my SSD wasnt showing.....?!?!?!

I went into the Raid Config and Raid 0'd the Samsungs. Windows 7 only showed 2TB of the 4TB when installed... :confused:

I then deactivated the RAID and had the Hard Drives Seperate....and installed windows.... Still no SSD in Windows nor in BIOS. IDE mode is active at the moment on the DVD and SSD port...

I have tried changing ports, placing the SSD in the original port and changed the power connecter with know working ones, but still nothing.

In disk management, you need to convert the volume to GPT if you want to see more than 2TB of it. It's a limitation of the MFT.
Note that you can't boot from a GPT volume, but that doesn't matter here.

Also I'll reiterate that 4TB of storage in RAID0 is a bad idea. Either use the drives seperately so you only risk losing half the data when a drive dies, or put them in RAID1 and get a little safety margin.
There's not a lot of point in having the extra speed on your storage drives, certainly not worth the risk.
 
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