SSD raid 0 help

[Tjj226_Angel]

Well guys, I need some help.

 

I just got two corsair force 3 90GB ssds for raid 0 on a X58 platform. I have both drives plugged into a sata II 3.0 gbps ports, and I have configured my BIOS for raid 0. The strip size is 128 kilobytes, and the created raid 0 array is bootable according to my bios.

 

I threw my Win 7 install disk in my pc and booted up to it with no issues. I installed Win 7 and let it expand it's files and when it asks to reboot I take out the Cd as it is rebooting. It gets to the point where it trys to go to the desktop and it just blue screens on me. After that it says there is no bootable media available. I have tried this three times now.

 

The only other thing that I found interesting is that it says on the first screen where it would tell you what types of drives you have, it comes up with nothing. The Raid array looks good an is recognized, but not on that page.

 

Any ideas?

[El_Capitan]

Not sure how to help, I stay away from RAID 0 boot drives.

[bigball1]

What raid drivers are you using?

[Waco]

If you can't see the drive when that first screen pops up you'll need to install the Intel RAID driver for the bootloader to see the array. Just hit the "add drivers" button and use the disc that came with your board. It'll be in a folder called "bootdrv" most likely - and use the x64 version if you're installing 64 bit.

[wevsspot]

That's pretty strange. I've installed Windows 7 on multiple RAID machines and the native Windows 7 SATA/RAID Intel drivers were always sufficient to get the OS installed completely. Assuming that everything else is kosher with your board, SATA cables, member drives and Windows 7 installation disk, I can only echo what has already been said. Apparently you'll need to manually install the SATA/RAID drivers from the installation disk that came with your motherboard. Or, if you want to use the latest drivers you can snag them directly from Intel (the CDROM version). I'm assuming this in on your ASUS P6X58 Deluxe board?

[Waco]

The newest installation media for Windows 7 tends to be missing a lot of drivers that were in the older versions.

 

Even my Z68 board needed the driver disk to install with the Windows 7 SP1 media refresh install disc.

[wevsspot]

I wonder why Microsoft would do that. I've got an older copy of Windows 7 Professional and it installed almost every driver I needed on my UD4. The only one it didn't have was for the Etron USB 3.0 driver. Stupid mistake on their part. That was one of the coolest features of Windows 7, having at least serviceable drivers installed so you could get a rig up and running before updating everything.

[Waco]

Yeah it's rather frustrating using the newest media. It was made worse when I needed to reimage my machine using the repair console...only to find out that I needed to install the drivers for my NIC and my RAID controller every time I opened it. Since I was messing with my SSD/HDD order (since the MS reimaging tool has no idea how to handle drive movement) and various configurations of my RAID array it got rather frustrating very quickly.

 

I eventually got to the point where I memorized the keyboard commands to install the drivers.

[wevsspot]

Speaking of imaging............ when you put an image back onto the SSD(s) do you need to do a full format of the SSD first to make sure that it is aligned properly? I've always wondered about that.

[Waco]

The way the Windows imaging tool works it reformats the drives before copying the image to them - so no matter what you end up with an aligned partition.

 

The only really frustrating thing about it is that it gets confused if you put your drives in a different order than when the image was created (which causes it to put the partitions on the wrong drives). This is only an issue if you have multiple system partitions, but it's still really annoying. The other huge annoyance is that it absolutely will not copy an image to a drive that's even 1 Byte smaller than the original drive (not the partition size, the actual physical drive size). I had to resort to a couple nasty hacks to make it work when I changed from 2x128 GB drives to 2x120 GB drives.

[wevsspot]

I've avoided the Windows backup utility for some of those exact same reasons, especially in situations where I have multiple hard drives and partitions. Instead I've resorted to Acronis True Image and Comodo Backup. I ran into a situation just late last year where I couldn't move my image onto a drive because it wasn't the exact same size as the original, so all of the work was lost and I was not happy. I'm not sure how Acronis or Comodo handle the SSD alignment though, so up to this point I've only been backing up my critical files, media collection, emails etc. and not even imaging the OS drive.

[Waco]

Windows can be forced to move to a smaller drive - it's just not super easy the first time if you don't know what you're doing. I "acquired" a boot disk that lets me inject drivers into an image or a partition, resize the restore image on the fly, and a couple other fun things. Now that I have that it's extremely easy to image back and forth between different setups.