RAID 1 (data drives) on P5B Deluxe - No Boot [screenshots]

[watterzz]

I have Vista Ultimate installed on my primary WD Raptor and am trying to set up a RAID 1 configuration on my 2 other WD drives for document backup purposes.

Problem: Vista will not load after configuring the RAID 1 setup on the secondary drives

My system:

Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
Intel Core2 e6600 @ 2.40 GHz
ASUS P5B Deluxe, Revision 1004
Corsair 2x1GB PC6400C4 Ram
WD Raptor X 150GB (Primary)
WD Caviar SE16 250GB (Secondary)
WD Caviar SE16 250GB (Secondary)

I have tried several things, but what makes the most sense to me are the following steps, which do not work.

With the system working fine, the BIOS looks like this, with all the SATA drives displaying properly. Again, the Raptor has Vista on it and the two additional WDs are empty, free for formatting and setting up the RAID 1.

Then I go to the IDE Configuration seen above and configure the SATA as RAID as shown below.

Then I save and exit back to startup where I enter the Intel Matrix Storage Manager by pressing ctrl+i. I create a RAID 1 volume on the two desired drives with the simple to use interface. The results of that are shown below, just before exiting the manager.

Then I exit back to startup where I get a Windows Error as shown below.

I start Windows normally and I only get as far as the next shot before it reboots itself.

I have tried manually selecting the boot device by pressing F8 during boot, but it leads to the same problem.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[sandmanwn]

Your raptor says it is in Raid mode now. Did it say it was in this mode before you setup the Raid1 on your 250's? If it did not then Vista is missing the drivers for the raid controller as they were not necessary before.

You can try disconnecting your WD250's and setting the controller back to its original settings then boot into windows.
Once there install your raid card drivers before switching back to raid mode.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Your raptor says it is in Raid mode now. Did it say it was in this mode before you setup the Raid1 on your 250's? If it did not then Vista is missing the drivers for the raid controller as they were not necessary before.

You can try disconnecting your WD250's and setting the controller back to its original settings then boot into windows.

That will get you booting on your Windows Vista installation normally again.

Once there install your raid card drivers before switching back to raid mode.

Can't do it. The south bridge can be in IDE/AHCI mode or RAID mode, but not both at the same time. Once Windows boots back up, there is no RAID controller to install drivers for.

To perform this maneuver, you need to follow Switching Storage Controllers without Reinstalling Windows, or you have to change to RAID mode and then reinstall Windows.

 

[watterzz]

This is what I tried and what eventually worked:

1. I installed the latest Vista RAID drivers. --> same problem: cycling reboot

2. I plugged the Raptor OS drive into a red boot connector and plugged the desired RAID drives into black non-boot connectors. --> same problem

3. I started from scratch, assigning the SATA as RAID, setting up the RAID 1 with Intel Matrix Storage Manager, and completely reinstalling Vista. --> WORKED with no problems. All Vista saw was one 250GB unallocated drive that I formatted as a simple volume in Vista.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and advice.

Note: Before I reinstalled Vista, I used its built-in complete PC backup option to make an image of everything on my external. I tried to put that image back on to save me from reinstalling all my programs, but once it finished loading the image, Vista wouldn't boot again! So I reinstalled...again...and just built everything up from scratch. But this is for another topic...