Raiding different drives?

SlyReaper

SlyReaper

SlyReaper

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I've got a Samsung Spinpoint 500GB drive and a Seagate Barracuda 500GB drive. Both have the same capacity, same spin speed and same cache.

Is it possible to RAID them?
 
I ran an 80GB Hitachi and 80GB Maxtor drive in RAID0 for a couple of years with no problems.

Your motherboard has RAID capabilities, just set it up in the BIOS. You'll lose any data on the disks though. If possible, create an image (Ghost etc) of windows, then set them up as RAID, then restore from the image. If you can't do that, then you'll have to reinstall Windows afterwards.
 
FAIL! :(

I set sata mode to RAID in the BIOS and used the configuration thingy to set up a raid volume. After that, Windows was refusing to start. It would get to the loading screen, then flash a very brief blue screen of death at me before restarting.

What am I missing?
 
SlyReaper said:
FAIL! :(

I set sata mode to RAID in the BIOS and used the configuration thingy to set up a raid volume. After that, Windows was refusing to start. It would get to the loading screen, then flash a very brief blue screen of death at me before restarting.

What am I missing?
Click to expand...

did you do a reinstall of windows or simply image it onto the raid array?

if its the latter either the raid controller may not be detected by windows as the drivers were not loaded or the boot files may be looking for the old partition / drive location.

you may also need to set the raid controller as the first boot device in the bios
 
Why would I need to do any of that? As I said before, I have Windows on an SSD that has nothing to do with either of the 500GB drives. They're just for mass storage. I haven't reinstalled Windows, I haven't imaged it anywhere, I'm not going to change the boot order because I don't WANT to boot from my raid array.
 
This is because you are changing the mode the controller is running in from IDE/AHCI to RAID and Windows needs different drivers. If you swap it back in your BIOS you should find that it will boot again.

The linked article might help, it explains how you need to install the drivers before changing your motherboard BIOS http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

I'm guessing your board only has one IDE/AHCI/RAID controller so you will have to use the SSD from the RAID controller. In these circumstances be aware that for your SSD, that TRIM is unlikely to work in Windows 7 as the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers are not enabled for it (not with Barefoot based drives anyway).
 
The linked article only enables the achi driver. I know this because I already did that a few days ago.

Is there an equivalent registry entry to enable the raid driver?
 
you need to install the raid driver first, goto your board manufacturers website and download the drivers. Undo what you did in the bios and boot up and install those drivers. Restart and change bios to raid again :)
 
Use at your own risk wrong thread

Note you can't install the Intel Matrix Storage drivers unless your RAID is enabled, so you need to extract them and then run a registry edit before it will work.

you need to install the raid driver first, goto your board manufacturers website and download the drivers. Undo what you did in the bios and boot up and install those drivers. Restart and change bios to raid again
Click to expand...

That won't work, because the RAID drivers won't install until RAID is enabled, and you can't enable RAID and still boot to Windows without a BSOD. Chicken and egg. See above for solution.

Edit: Ahh sugar, that link is for AHCI, the one I wanted to link to won't display here....try this search in google "How to enable AHCI/RAID mode without reinstalling windows (P35/ICH9/ICH9R)" the first link should be the thread I wanted to show you.
 
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Doesn't work. The links in those posts are outdated, and getting the current ones doesn't work. Says I don't meet the minimum system requirements (see my system in my sig to see how ridiculous that is).

I think I'll leave it alone until my next reinstall. Probably when the full version arrives in October.
 
Nope, it's what I was trying. It says "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing the software. Setup will exit."
 
Quoth the server: "404". :)

No worries, thanks to the wonders of USB sticks and solid state drives, reinstalling Windows is quick and painless. I'll make the RAID volume properly on my next install.

Thanks for your help though.
 
There is a way to do it, or at least I've used this to switch XP/Vista from IDE to ACHI before.

Download the drivers from IBM.
Start, Run...
IATA89ENU.exe -a -p c:\temp
That should extract the drivers to the path specified.
Then go into device manager, update drivers, browse to that folder and untick the 'show compatible drivers only', pick the right one for your controller and install it.
Let it reboot but go into the BIOS and change it over to ACHI/RAID before windows boots.


Like I say I've only done this to switch from IDE to ACHI before but should be ok.
 
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