Windows 7: Help with RAID

Hi guys,

I hope I can explain this correctly...

I have two 1tb spinpoint f3 hdd's and 1 ocz ssd. I setup raid on the two hdd, then I disconnected all drives except for the ssd and I installed W7 pro64. During the installation I installed the appropriate drivers for the ssd/raid.

So I boot up into win7 and download all the win updates etc. Then I shutoff and install the raid hdds. Boot up into windows and the raid drives dont show up. I checked disk management and the two 1tb drives show up as 1 drive but I need to format them. Do I choose NEW STRIPED VOLUME? Im confused about this, since I already setup raid via bios, wont this be like setting up software raid? Should I just choose setup new simple volume instead? Please help! I couldnt find the answer to this anywhere!

thank you in advance!!!

I don't know where you get this striped bit from, maybe I missed something when I set my discs up.
I set up 2 x RAID 0 in the Bios and in windows they showed up correctly as two single drives which I then partitioned as simple volumes

I hope this helps

Choose new simple volume.

Thanks for the info guys!

Pooch, I think something must have not been recognized properly by windows or there was a problem with the array setup in bios. From what I have read since last night, it seems that if it is setup properly/or recognized correctly by windows, the 2 disks in the array should show up as 1 combined drive, eliminating the need to do a software raid(striped volume etc).

I am extremely new to this and so, I could definitely be wrong here. I think someone with the experience should clarify this as I too am concerned with why yours did it a different way than mine.

pbcopter, what do you think about that?

Hi,

When you boot the computer, check the POST screen as a check that the RAID configured correctly. In the POST, it should list the drives and whether they belong to a particular array or not.

If you are configuring a hardware array (from within BIOS), which is what you are trying to do, you should not need to choose simple volume. Check the BIOS POST screen to see that the RAID is configured correctly.

Regards,
Golden

I checked the bios post screen and it lists all of my drives as well as the array. Everything looks good there! Doesnt it make sense that I would need to format the array prior to use (keeping in mind that my os is on my ssd and the raid drives were not formatted during os installation)?

Ah, that could be the issue. Since the drives weren't formatted when the RAID was setup, you do need to set it to New Simple Volume as per pbcopters suggestion.

Regards,
Golden

Yea I figured that was why, nice to know that it really is.

Looks like you are managing quite nicely