Going from AHCI to RAID  

So, I wasn't able to install W7 in RAID because the installation wouldn't recognize any proper driver for the installation. I have no idea why, but anyway, I decided to proceed by installing in AHCI mode.

So now, Windows is fully installed, I have an ASUS Rampage Formula IV motherboard (X79) with a SSD and 2 HDDs.

So I tried a lot of stuff, from booting into safe mode, changing Start values from 3 to 0 for most drivers in regedit.exe... but whatever I do, safe mode or not, I get a BSOD on boot with the 0x0000007b error.

I had IRST 12.8 installed. After a lot of frustration, I decided to try IDE for fun, and to my surprise, it booted with no problem whatsoever. So, Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1 fully updated, I can now boot with either IDE or AHCI drivers, but can't with RAID drivers.

In regedit, I have those 3 folders: iaStorA, iaStorF and iaStorV. I can see that the appropriate drivers are correctly in C:\windows\system32\drivers.

I don't know what to do now. When I boot in AHCI, IRST will start and I see the "Intel C600 AHCI" or something similar showing in the device manager, but I can't install the RAID driver. I tried adding a "legacy hardware" to force the installation of the RAID driver but it won't complete for some reason.

I'm kind of stuck right now. This computer had W7 working in RAID before.

What I have done in the past is to boot with the system drive connected to one of the non Intel controllers.

If it will boot, shut down and set the Intel controller to Raid in the BIOS..

Reboot with the system disk still connected to the non Intel controller. I usually keep one of my other drives connected to the Intel controller so I can see if it is visible in Windows after it finds the Raid driver.

The system should now load the proper RAID drivers. Now move the system disk back to the Intel controller.

Actually, installing the ASmedia SATA controller driver and booting on that controller worked. I was then able to switch from AHCI to RAID for the chipset SATA controller, and after that, I could boot on that controller with no problem. I finally disabled the ASMedia controller again (faster boot).

Don't you think I tried the F6 thing? The problem is, no driver would help recognize my SSD. And even in Windows right now, it was a real mess to find the appropriate driver to get the chipset RAID recognized. For some reasons, all the drivers on ASUS won't work, the installer just say that my system isn't compatible. Same for Intel. But I was able to get an older version of the driver on Intel website, and that finally worked. After that, Windows Update installed the latest driver and the IRST is still working with the older version (since the newer version says it's not compatible with my system for some reasons).

Anyway, problem solved, but that was so complicated for nothing.

Also note that the W10 installation disc would just crash if I tried to install in RAID mode, but would work fine in AHCI or IDE. There is really something with my board and the RAID drivers lol.

Layback Bear said:

From post #1

So I tried a lot of stuff, from booting into safe mode, changing Start values from 3 to 0 for most drivers in regedit.exe.

I have found this to cause problems. Some drivers will not load properly.

What am I missing.
I don't believe you have stated why you are trying to use Raid.

Raid is pretty much useless with 1 ssd and 2 hard drives IMHO>

Raid is still used a lot on servers for redundancy with several drives. We don't want to loose any of our great post.

Raid speed is only going to be as fast as the slowest drive.
If I remember correctly the server for this forum uses Raid 10.

dnLL did you use to do this kind of raid thing when you were using XP?

I haven't used XP since A LOT of time, and I didn't have a RAID at that time, no.

As a computer enthusiast and with the hardware I have, I just enjoy using the built-in functionalities in my hardware as much as possible. I do have one use for RAID: a RAID1 for redundancy. My RAID1 is partitioned in such a way that I have my data on one half of the volume, and the other half is just a backup made once a week. This way, I'm protected against hardware failure (RAID1) and manipulation error (one hidden partition being a backup). Obviously, if someone just decide to delete the backup, I'm screwed. This is why I do another backup a couple of times every year to an external drive.

It's just basic protections because I work on a lot of projects and I don't want to lose years of work. Because I have gigabytes of data that I accumulated over the years (text and images, but mostly text since I'm a programmer), I don't want to lose it all too easily, and I don't feel well protected with cloud solutions for a couple of reasons (security being a big factor here, we, IT guys, are all paranoid about that, right?).

Anyway.

I'm not even backing up my OS or movies or musics, all of this can be downloaded/installed again if I need to, but years of work can't. So that's why. I think that RAID1 just works. And RAID1 isn't complicated, if my motherboard decides to explode, no problem, I can read each drive seperately from any SATA controller. This is obviously not the case with RAID0 or RAID10, since you would need the same chipset/SATA controller.

Layback Bear said:

From post #1

So I tried a lot of stuff, from booting into safe mode, changing Start values from 3 to 0 for most drivers in regedit.exe.

I have found this to cause problems. Some drivers will not load properly.

What am I missing.
I don't believe you have stated why you are trying to use Raid.

Raid is pretty much useless with 1 ssd and 2 hard drives IMHO>

Raid is still used a lot on servers for redundancy with several drives. We don't want to loose any of our great post.

Raid speed is only going to be as fast as the slowest drive.
If I remember correctly the server for this forum uses Raid 10.

dnLL did you use to do this kind of raid thing when you were using XP?

SSD raid speed scales almost linearly with more SSDs. It would be more correct to state that raid speed is as fast as the slowest drive multiplied by the number of striped drives in the array.