Configuring 2 x 3TB drives with Asus m'board and UEFI

Morning all, and I hope you can help with a problem that has been driving me nuts.

In short, I have replaced a failed HDD with 2 shiny new 3TB drives that I'd like as a mirrored pair. I'd like to avoid h/w level mirroring so knowing Win7 can handle it via s/w is good. I soon found I needed Windows Professional handle the disk size. Soon after that I found I needed a new motherboard that supported UEFI and bought an ASUS M5A97 (LE R2.0)

I seem to be spending far too much time in setting this up as a small BIOS change (for example AHCI vs IDE, or UEFI drivers first) either allows / prevents Windows setup from seeing my USB stick, or seeing it but not accepting the drivers I've copied on to it, not recognising the full disk size, gives mesages where Windows cannot be installed on the partition . .

What I'm after is something really basic. Something like

• Check BIOS is set for XYZ
• Use driver def from here (Asus site is dreadful and suggests drivers are installed post installation ???)

I don't need each and every step, just the experience of someone to say how the BIOS should be configured would be a good start.


Many thanks on advance.

The drives have to be GPT (GUID) and the BIOS has to be set to UEFI and you have to jump through some hoops to get Win 7 to install on a UEFI system. Check the forum tutorials for installing windows on a UEFI system.

It's my understanding that hardware RAID is superior to a software RAID setup. Why the reluctance to do it though your motherboard controller and go the software route?
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) - Install Windows 7 with

Previous experience of a motherboard failing and unable to recover the disks without finding a replacement one with the same chipset / firmware etc. All lost and had to start again.
My assumption (rightly or wrongly) is if the mirroring is handled by the OS, it would eliminate h/w failures and could be rebuilt using a similar OS (and OS's tend to be backwards compatible)

JohnFol said:

Previous experience of a motherboard failing and unable to recover the disks without finding a replacement one with the same chipset / firmware etc. All lost and had to start again.
My assumption (rightly or wrongly) is if the mirroring is handled by the OS, it would eliminate h/w failures and could be rebuilt using a similar OS (and OS's tend to be backwards compatible)

Ok, sounds like a valid point. I'm thinking mirroring should be immune to that though. I could see a striped set being dependent on the hardware it was created on. In any case go with what works for you. I don't have a lot of experience with RAID setups.