RAID 5 help, won't boot with RAID drives attached.

[Backintheda]

Built a media/server machine finally which I am trying to setup a RAID 5 on. Here is my trouble and below that the system specs.

I am using a RocketRaid 640L card as the RAID controller with 4 2TB drives. My boot drive is a 250GB SSD. When no SATA cables are connected to the RAID card, it boots to my desktop without issue. When they are connected, it just hangs at a black screen with a cursor trying to boot. My guess is the computer is trying to boot from one of those drives. However, when I am at my desktop, and I connect the SATA cables, my computer recognizes the drives. I even went as far as using RocketRaid's utility to create a RAID 5, which was successful. But in My Computer, I only see my SSD.

I am guessing something in the BIOS is not configured correctly but I am not sure what it could be. I have verified, several times, that the boot drive is the SSD. The RocketRaid card has up to date drivers. Any ideas on what is going on here?

thanks.

Intel i3 4160 Haswell
ASrock H97M
8GB RAM 4x2
Corsair 500watt PSU

 

[shiitaki]

I think you are dealing with a MBR booting versus UEFI booting. The RAID controller has firmware for booting purposes, and it seems you may not be loading the proper ROM at boot time. So you might be booting Windows UEFI, but loading BIOS ROM. Or the other way around. Probably just have to experiment with CSM settings. Things with names like option ROMs, load UEFI ROM first; that kind of thing. If there are no drives attached to the controller, it is likely by passing loading any ROMs, and so boots from the onboard SATA controller. And that is another area, if it detects a additional storage controller, the motherboard firmware may be ignoring the built in SATA. And there can be settings for that as well in the boot options, varies by motherboard.

Theoretically, you shouldn't need any rom loaded if you are not going to boot from it, so disabling the loading of additional ROMs from storage adapters at boot is a good idea, but I don't know what it would be called in your firmware, or that if there is a setting to specify that.

The current sate of software RAID is such that you might want to consider simply using the motherboard SATA, and use Windows software RAID instead anyway. The RAID would become hardware independent, less setup, no need for drives with Time Limited Error Recovery. The only downside of a software RAID is the lack of boot support, which you should never do anyway. Mix your data and your OS.

 

[popatim]

Do you have the bios set to boot the SSD first or did the Raid jump ahead of it?