Installing RAID 1 on ASUS P5Q Deluxe

[cjconrad]

This is my first post, and I appreciate the existence of this community!

My question is a mix of System Board and RAID ...

I have a P5Q Deluxe with four Seagate 1TB SATA drives (SATA1-4) plus a SATA DVD Writer (SATA6). In the BIOS, the SATA is set to "IDE" (I had problems installing the OS using the AHCI setting). I now have installed Windows Server 2003, and want to setup RAID 1 (mirror) on SATA drives 1 & 2. SATA1 is my current boot, and SATA2 is the same drive model, empty (new drive, just formatted).

I am on BIOS 605, which came with the board. When I encountered problems installing W2K3, I tried to upgrade the BIOS, but my problems persisted and I would end up with the BIOS back to 605 (I didn't overtly reinstall or revert 605, but somehow it was back). In retrospect, I believe that the only real problem I had with the install was the SATA setting, as I had been trying to use AHCI.

In any case, I want to get the RAID working, but I am a bit scared for a few reasons:
(1) I don't want to lose my current drive content (so I want to be sure that I can control which drive is the "master copy"); As the P5Q manual does not give a walk-thru of setting up the RAID 1, I want to ensure that I will be able to specify just the two drives involved (and which already has data) without putting anything else at risk.
(2) Given the problems with my AHCI attempts, I am not confident that the SATA support is mature (and hence, the RAID support)
(3) As the BIOS mysteriously reverted itself to earlier version at least twice, I am concerned that anything requiring a BIOS upgrade might not be reliable.

Opinions and/or advise?

Thanks to all in advance ... Craig

 

[cjconrad]

OK, I have made some progress. I was able to move the boot drive to the other SATA ports (SIL5723 set of two), and it booted, as it already had these drivers. Then I set the BIOS to "RAID" for the original set of 6 SATA ports, and rebooted, which brought up the "Found New Hardware" wizard, allowing me to install the RAID drivers onto my boot drive. Then I moved the drive back to its original port (which is now in RAID mode, instead of IDE mode), and it booted fine.

So, I am half-way there. I now have my drives on SATA ports set to RAID in the BIOS. However, I need to establish the RAID-1 set. I just want to have my boot drive (on port 0) mirrored to an identical drive on port 1.

How do I establish the RAID set with an existing drive? In other words, I do not want to lose the data on the existing functional drive -- I just want to begin mirroring it to a new drive.

Thanks, Craig

 

[DV8_MKD]

I don't think that you can do raid on your bootable drives after you've installed your OS on them. You have to do it BEFORE you install it.

 

[cjconrad]

I was able to add RAID after installing the OS. My steps were:

After installing Windows 2003 with the SATA controller BIOS
set to "IDE" instead of "RAID", I wanted to add a RAID 1 set. However,
when I changed BIOS to "RAID" and tried to boot the drive, Windows would
blue screen and re-boot. I had to find a way to get the RAID drivers installed
on Windows (a chicken & egg problem):
1. Moved the boot drive to the other SATA controller (the built system
already had the drivers for this, as this controller had already
been recognized. For safety, I disconnected all other drives. I
booted it just to ensure that it worked.
2. Set BIOS to "RAID" on the original controller ports & rebooted (the
boot drive still in the alternative port). Windows came up with the
"Found New Hardware" wizard, and I let it find the drivers on the
diskette (I had built this earlier). Powered down.
3. Moved the boot drive back to the original ports (which were now "RAID"
ports) and re-booted to ensure that all was well (also had to change
the DVD drive to "R" again). Powered-down. System is now "RAID Ready".
4. Booted and installed latest "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" (v8.0) from
"i:\..\install\asussetup.exe" and re-booted.
5. Power-down, connect the mirror drive, re-boot.
6. Either via BIOS (press Ctrl-I) or via the IMSM software above,
established the RAID 1 array.
7. After the mirror has been created, do an orderly power-down and
re-boot to ensure that it comes up correctly.
8. Re-connected (one at a time) the non-RAID drives.

Working well for the past 10 months or so

 

[Guest]

I was able to add RAID after installing the OS. My steps were:

After installing Windows 2003 with the SATA controller BIOS
set to "IDE" instead of "RAID", I wanted to add a RAID 1 set. However,
when I changed BIOS to "RAID" and tried to boot the drive, Windows would
blue screen and re-boot. I had to find a way to get the RAID drivers installed
on Windows (a chicken & egg problem):
1. Moved the boot drive to the other SATA controller (the built system
already had the drivers for this, as this controller had already
been recognized. For safety, I disconnected all other drives. I
booted it just to ensure that it worked.
2. Set BIOS to "RAID" on the original controller ports & rebooted (the
boot drive still in the alternative port). Windows came up with the
"Found New Hardware" wizard, and I let it find the drivers on the
diskette (I had built this earlier). Powered down.
3. Moved the boot drive back to the original ports (which were now "RAID"
ports) and re-booted to ensure that all was well (also had to change
the DVD drive to "R" again). Powered-down. System is now "RAID Ready".
4. Booted and installed latest "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" (v8.0) from
"i:\..\install\asussetup.exe" and re-booted.
5. Power-down, connect the mirror drive, re-boot.
6. Either via BIOS (press Ctrl-I) or via the IMSM software above,
established the RAID 1 array.
7. After the mirror has been created, do an orderly power-down and
re-boot to ensure that it comes up correctly.
8. Re-connected (one at a time) the non-RAID drives.

Working well for the past 10 months or so

I have XP on one drive. I bought two identical drives to set a raid1.

I have a problem on the step2.

I have Win XP and a ASUS P5Q Turbo and I cannot set the RAID (instead if IDE) in the bios without having to face the blue screen of death at the start of windows.
I cannot set only one SATA controller to RAID. It has to be everything set to RAID (instead if IDE).
Windows just won't start if the bios is set to RAID.

 

[srfdude_29]

I have XP on one drive. I bought two identical drives to set a raid1.

I have a problem on the step2.

I have Win XP and a ASUS P5Q Turbo and I cannot set the RAID (instead if IDE) in the bios without having to face the blue screen of death at the start of windows.
I cannot set only one SATA controller to RAID. It has to be everything set to RAID (instead if IDE).
Windows just won't start if the bios is set to RAID.

I'm just starting this exact thing, haven't found much on the 'net. But having setup a couple of new installation raid setups, I suspect the way is to hook your raid drives up, disconnect the existing OS drive, and start the windows install and go until you get windows finished. At that point hook hook up the original drive and reset it to be the boot drive, then clone the system to the raid disks. Even though the system is using the raid drivers, it will allow an IDE drive to work.

 

[HopePro2]

I was able to add RAID after installing the OS. My steps were:

After installing Windows 2003 with the SATA controller BIOS
set to "IDE" instead of "RAID", I wanted to add a RAID 1 set. However,
when I changed BIOS to "RAID" and tried to boot the drive, Windows would
blue screen and re-boot. I had to find a way to get the RAID drivers installed
on Windows (a chicken & egg problem):
1. Moved the boot drive to the other SATA controller (the built system
already had the drivers for this, as this controller had already
been recognized. For safety, I disconnected all other drives. I
booted it just to ensure that it worked.
2. Set BIOS to "RAID" on the original controller ports & rebooted (the
boot drive still in the alternative port). Windows came up with the
"Found New Hardware" wizard, and I let it find the drivers on the
diskette (I had built this earlier). Powered down.
3. Moved the boot drive back to the original ports (which were now "RAID"
ports) and re-booted to ensure that all was well (also had to change
the DVD drive to "R" again). Powered-down. System is now "RAID Ready".
4. Booted and installed latest "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" (v8.0) from
"i:\..\install\asussetup.exe" and re-booted.
5. Power-down, connect the mirror drive, re-boot.
6. Either via BIOS (press Ctrl-I) or via the IMSM software above,
established the RAID 1 array.
7. After the mirror has been created, do an orderly power-down and
re-boot to ensure that it comes up correctly.
8. Re-connected (one at a time) the non-RAID drives.

Working well for the past 10 months or so

Huge thanks to cjconrad I can confirm that this method worked perfectly for me too:

Windows 7 Professional 32Bit / ASUS P5Q Deluxe.

I think the reason we've been able to do this is the fact the P5Q motherboards have 2 separate SATA controllers. So the trick really is to move the primary drive over to this 'spare' Marvel controller and let the OS figure out how to operate the main Intel controller with RAID enabled. Most advice out there states that you can't convert an existing OS to RAID, which is probably true if you just have the one SATA controller, which is the case with most motherboards. I'm guessing this method should also work with a dedicated RAID controller card.

I installed Intel Matrix Storage Manager version 8.9.xxxx (can't remember the rest). I let Intel check my chipset via their website and it recommended that version.

At stage 6. I used the Intel Matrix Storage Manager software to create the RAID 1 array. I was very impressed at how simple this was to do. For a 90% full 250GB drive, it took 1 hour 40 minutes to create the RAID 1 array. Now every time I boot to Windows, a nice little message pops up in the taskbar reminding me that my PC is secure and running in RAID 1.

In Drive Management, Windows only detects one hard drive, i.e. the RAID array is totally transparent to the OS, just like it should be !

In terms of performance, absolutely no change ! I went into Control Panel / Performance Information and Tools and ran the hardware assessment test again. My previous score for 'Primary Hard Disk' was 5.9 and after converting to RAID 1 it's now 5.8 so that confirms there's no loss in performance.

So overall I'm really pleased. I'd read that the ICH10R chipset was the best RAID option, short of getting a full blown controller card. So I took the risk of upgrading my motherboard just so that I'd have this chipset. I didn't realise how significant the dual SATA controllers would be when I bought the P5Q, now I realise I made a very good choice, albeit a lucky one, as it would have been a nightmare to have to reinstall the OS.

So thanks again to cjconrad, you're a star !

 

[snakeeyes75]

Hi all forum readers, another big thank you to CJConrad! I was in a similar situation and his solution helped after not being able to find documentation on the web!

I had some HDD and card problems in January 2011 and while fixing those my RAID 1 setup failed. I decided to separate my OS (Vista 32) on one HDD and have RAID 1 for data.

Problem: Had already re-installed OS in 3rd HDD with m-board setting to [IDE] instead of RAID. Switching to RAID caused blue-screen.

Initially, the Orange/Grey SATA ports connected to the Sis chip did not recognize my SATA disk (step 1 in list). Switching the Marvel IDE on from the motherboard helped. (The HDD appeared to be IDE even though its SATA). The OS booted, I rebooted, went into BIOS, switched main ports to RAID, rebooting got the OS to recognize the Intel ICH10R chip and install drivers (I downloaded from Asus site).

After that, re-switching the OS HDD to port0 worked! Then went on to install the 2 data SATA disks and create a RAID 1 array as described in this thread.

Thanks once again CJConrad!

 

[morseman21]

I tried the above recommendations but it did not work for me. Each time I tried to put the boot drive in the Drive Xpert Orange SATA port Windows 7 64-bit would hang at the starting windows screen. I even tried using the Drive Xpert feature and that too failed because Windows would bluescreen during bootup.

My original intent was to use the built in RAID controller included with the Intel ICH10R Southbridge Controller. This seemed to be better than using a half controller / half software feature that Drive Xpert utilizes.

I found the fix in a Windows KD article; 922976. Here is the link, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

It seems that upon installation of the OS Windows turns off the drivers for the SouthBridge Controller modes that are not implemented at installation. The KB describes a manual fix or you can download the hotfix that changes these settings automatically. After making the suggested changes, I activated RAID in Bios and setup raid 1 in the RAID controller properties. Windows 7 64-bit booted perfect after these changes and my computer now has RAID 1 with 1TB of storage.

Equipment:
Mother Board: ASUS P5Q Deluxe
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00 GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT


Hope this helps.

Morseman21