Raid and Windows 7

[casey]

I have just built my first pc and have installed 4 1tb hard disks that I wish to configure in RAID 5. I configured the BIOS for RAID 5 for these 4 disks and I copied the SATA drivers across from the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Motherboard disk so that I could install them during the Windows 7 installation. The drivers were present om the list and I selected and installed them, completing the OS installtion.

The problem is that the does not appear in windows explorer and when I look in disk management the RAID drive appears as 2 units under Disk 0 split into 2.0tb and roughly .75tb. Both unallocated.

So my questions are:

1 Why isn't the full RAID volume of 4tb shown in explorer?
2. What do I need to do to set the RAID up properly?

Hope you can help

 

[bobkn]

I haven't tried RAID under Win7, but it sounds like you may be bumping up against the 2TB limit for a boot disk configured with a MBR.

I believe that the array must be partitioned with the largest partition 2TB or smaller.

Here's one starting point:

Extensible Firmware Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As far as I know, the only mainstream maker that has embraced EFI is Apple ( on their latest Intel Macs).

 

[casey]

Thanks for the help

Seems like when I get the Raid / Windows 7 problem fixed I need to change the protocol from MBR to GPT or live with the 2tb max

Now can anybody assist on the other aspect of my problem?