Reimage your Drive from Native IDE to Raid 0

I ADVISE TO DOWNLOAD THE ATTACHED WORD DOCUMENT FOR BEST READABILITY


The main points for this guide is to upgrade your installation of windows 7, from it being installed onto a single drive, to raid 0 array of 2 drives. My reason for this is that i had OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition SATA III SSD 240GB, but i ran out of data space on this windows installation and i thought it was most wise to upgrade to raid 0 rather than buying a bigger SSD due to the performance increase.
More in-depth of my gear that may relate to this guide:
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Drives: OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition SATA III SSD 240GB
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H

INFORMATION OF MY MOTHERBOARDS SATA PORTS
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| 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
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| 1 | 3 | 5 | 7 |
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0 - 5 are blue ports that are SATA 3 6Gbps, which are controlled by ICH10R Southbridge and support RAID 0/1/5/10, you can configure the settings for these ports at the third setup screen at boot, and, to turn the raid on for these ports, go to integrated peripherals, OnChip SATA Controller: enabled, OnChip SATA Type: raid, OnChip SATA Port4/5 Type: same as Sata, OnChip SATA RAID5 Support: disabled

6 - 7 are white ones that are GSATA 2 3Gbps, which are controlled by two JMicron 322 storage processors and support RAID 0/1/JBOD, you can configure the settings for these ports at the second setup screen at boot is the raid setup utility, to turn the raid on for these ports, go to integrated peripherals, Onboard GSATA/IDE Ctrl: enabled, Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode: raid


1. First of all disconnect all Sata ports, connect the drive that we will backup, and the drive that we will backup to, to port 4, 5, because we will later enable ports 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 to raid and if the drives were connected those ports, windows would've rebooted on "windows starting".
2. By default with this system raid is disabled, (if it isn't disable it then start the pc, keep pressing del to get into the bios, go to integrated peripherals
· OnChip Sata controller: enable
· OnChip Sata type: native ide
· OnChip Sata3.0 support: enable
· Onboard gSata/ide ctrl: enable
· Onboard Sata/ide ctrl mode: ide
press f10, press enter, reboot to windows, go to start, in the search box type regedit, press enter, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\, for the following list, click on the folder from the list, on the right, double click on start and change the parameter to the following:
· atapi Start = 3 (THIS IS IDE, HAVE IT ON 3 SINCE 3 MEANS OFF)
· iaStor = 3 (THIS IS INTEL RAID, HAVE IT ON 3 SINCE 3 MEANS OFF)
· iastorV Start = 0 (THIS IS WINDOWS RAID, HAVE IT ON 0 SINCE 0 MEANS ON)
· intelide Start = 3 (THIS IS IDE, HAVE IT ON 3 SINCE 3 MEANS OFF)
· msahci Start = 3 (THIS IS AHCI, HAVE IT ON 3 SINCE 3 MEANS OFF)
· pciide = 3 (THIS IS IDE, HAVE IT ON 3 SINCE 3 MEANS OFF)
once done go to file, exit, shut down the pc without force rebooting.
3. So the software side of raid is now manually configured, installed and all ports will read the drives if set to raid, so it's time to configure the hardware side of raid via the BIOS. Reboot, keep pressing del to get into the bios, go to integrated peripherals, and change to the following settings:
· OnChip Sata type: raid
1. This enables raid on ports 0, 1, 2, 3, but windows will not boot without the next settings like disabling raid5 and enabling raid on Onboard Sata
2. OnChip Sata port4/5 type: same as Sata
3. This enables raid on ports 4 and 5
4. OnChip Sata raid5 support: disable
5. This is necessary to disable otherwise window will not boot up
6. Onboard Sata/ide ctrl mode: raid/ide
7. This enables raid on ports 6 and 7 and makes the OnChip Sata controller let windows boot from the drives connected to those ports, if we don't set these settings then the pc will just keep on rebooting on "Windows Starting", but with raid5 disabled and Onboard Sata/ide ctrl correctly set up you can connect to all 8 ports and windows will boot up correctly
4. Raid is now setup on the software and hardware side
· Which means you won't get errors for example "say you connect CD/DVD drive to a raid configured port, that drive will encounter errors like when installing windows you will get an error saying: "a required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing..." or when your recovering a backup using Acronis "failed to read from sector 0 of hard disk 1", and other hard drives won't even be viewable)
So press f10, press enter, reboot to windows, once rebooted into windows, at the bottom right you can see a little green dot spinning, this is windows installing drivers for the raid controllers, once it's done it will ask you to restart, so click on restart now, once back in windows, give it 5 minutes to see if windows will install more drivers automatically, if not turn off the pc, disconnect all the Sata cables from the ports, and connect the drive we are going to back up to the blue port 0, the new SSD drive to port 1, the drive we are going to back up to, to port 2 and a CD/DVD drive to port 3, once again very necessary that we connect to the blue port as its Sata 3 which means its 6gps rather than the white port which is Sata 2 3gps, once done, turn the pc on, again check if windows installs drivers, if it does and asks you to reboot, do so, repeat until it doesn't install any more drives via windows
5. Once windows finished installing all controller and drive drives, it's time to make an image of the complete drive, so we will use Acronis True Image Home, you can download a free trial of the website which lets you use the program for free for 15 days, which is more than enough if you're using this guide, so install it, and once done, go to start > all programs > Acronis > Acronis True Image Home > Acronis True Image Home:
a. click on backup system, at the top right click on multiple systems selected
b. at further top right, click on click on switch to disk mode
c. check the source drive
d. in destination select the destination drive you want to write to
e. in the backup scheme, click on the blue hyperlink, in the backup method select full, at the bottom left check save the settings as default, click on the performance tab, in compression level click and drag to none, click on ok
f. click on backup now at the bottom right, this may take an hour or more
g. once done, click on the backup and recovery tab at the top, click on create bootable media, click on next, check everything, click on next twice, select your disc writer, click on next, put a compact disc into your disc writer, click on proceed, click on ok when done, make a note of the name, drive letter, model number, data size, of the source drive and the destination drive, close the program and shut down the pc.
6. Now that software, hardware raid is setup, windows drivers are installed, we have a backup image of the drive, and a bootable imaging software, were going to create the raid array. so start the pc, now there will be a boot bios screen, then raid setup utility, on that screen, and only then (don't tap as it won't work) ctrl + f, press 2 to enter ld view / ld define menu, press ctrl + c, to scroll through the selection press up or down, to change the parameter space, change raid mode to raid 0, for stripe block, the higher the number the faster performance for larger files, for example video games, videos, and so on, whilst smaller the number is for smaller files like text files, word and so on, now go down to the drive selection, press space to change the parameter to y, change to y to the drives you want in the array, press ctrl + y to save settings, then again, and change the name to whatever you want to call your new array/drive, press enter, press ctrl + y again to erase the master boot record of those disks, since we don't need it as were going to recover the drive image, press any key to use maximum capacity of the array, now you are done and can press esc to exit the setup, press esc then y to reboot.
7. Now to restore the image to the new array, disconnect all USB drives expect the mouse and keyboard, boot the pc and keep pressing 12 to enter boot menu, insert the compact disc in the disc writer, select CD-ROM, press enter, select Acronis True Image Home, press enter, in recover click on my disks, navigate to the recovery file, click on next, make sure recover whole disks and partitions are checked, click on next, check everything, check the drive we are going to recover to (the raid array), click on next, click on proceed, the programs drive should have increase the capacity to max and the active partition should be the system reserved one, check restart the computer when recovery is completed, once done and back in windows, eject the disk, windows may install drivers again, once it's done it will ask you to restart, so click on restart now, once back in windows, give it 5 minutes to see if windows will install more drivers automatically, if not turn off the pc, connect the rest of the drives to the Sata ports, now turn on the pc and keep pressing del to enter the bios, advanced bios features, hard disk boot priority, change the new raid array to the top, press f10, press y, press enter to reboot, now that your back in windows, windows may install drivers again, once it's done it will ask you to restart, so click on restart now, once back in windows, give it 5 minutes to see if windows will install more drivers automatically, if it doesn't, check that all the drives appear in my computer and are assigned the correct drive letter, if they are not, go to start, search, disk management, press enter, right click on each disk one by one at the bottom where the blue rows are, (excluding the raid array), change drive letter and path, click on remove, click on yes twice, repeat but this time add and assign the letter to the list above, including the CD/DVD drive, once done, reboot the pc.