Intel ICH10R RAID question

[LxMxFxD4]

What I have now is a 1TB drive that has windows and data on it.

What I want to do is create a 4 disk raid 5 array (with 300GB legacy drives) on my motherboard's ICH10R controller with intel software in windows so as to tell me when a drive fails.

So it would look like this:

Disk 1 - 1TB Bootable windows drive (ACHI)
Disk 2 - 300GB raid5 disk 1
Disk 3 - 300GB raid5 disk 2
Disk 4 - 300GB raid5 disk 3
Disk 5 - 300GB raid5 disk 4

I already have windows on the boot drive, but when I switch to "raid" controller setup in bios my ACHI intall of winxp obviously wont boot from that disk.

Other problem I have is when I go to use Intel Matrix Storage Console in windows, I can't create a raid setup or anything, as far as I can tell.

The only "solution" I've found is that I switch in bios to raid storage (instead of ACHI), create a volume, then switch back to ACHI. This boots windows xp and disk manager shows the newly created volume (disks 2-5) as 1 continuous drive. This is a neat little "hack" but my fear is that if a drive fails, theres no way of seeing which one it is AND who knows if the 3 disk array will be readable and how it will rebuild the array when I replace the drive.

Is there a solution here that DOESNT involve me reinstalling windows on the boot drive and running windows in "raid mode" and thus losing all the performance boosts on that boot drive that come with ACHI?

Thanks in advance.

 

[darkenedsoul]

Hmm, I was in a similar boat so to speak. I had raid 1 and wanted to break apart my drives, the hacks I tried (registry file that I ran, etc...) didn't work and got bsod. I ended up swapping out the drives for slightly smaller and set it up as AHCI.

What I *think* would work is the 2nd half of what you mentioned, switch to RAID in BIOS and create your raid 5 setup. Switch back to AHCI and boot and you said it saw the drives. A quick test of this would be to pull one of the 4 RAID 5 drives from a powered-down standpoint and bring the system back up, it should only show 3 of the 4 and maybe say running degraded. If that works, shut down, re-connect the pulled drive and power back up and see if it starts rebuilding via the matrix storage manager software. If it does, you may be all set. I'm sort of surprised it wouldn't let you create it while in windows.

hth,

Mike

 

[LxMxFxD4]

Hey dark,

Thanks for your input.

I figured out after reading the white paper that ACHI is enabled on the RAID setting in the bios (it says RAID: Raid, ACHI enabled). So in my infinite wisdom instead of creating a volume in the bios raid setup, I didn't select anything and BOOM, booted into xp.

But now I have a new problem.

After updating my HD controller driver to the intel raid driver, intel matrix storage console now says that I can create a raid array. So what do I do? I go to create one and it says "array creation has failed" after hanging for about 30 seconds.

Boo.

Also, if it is of any help, windows Disk Management does NOT see any of the 4 drives that Intel storage manager console does. I suspect this is natural because they're on the raid controller now, maybe.

Any thoughts at this point as to why it wont let me select the 4 drives to create an array?

 

[LxMxFxD4]

Originally posted by: LxMxFxD4
Hey dark,

Thanks for your input.

I figured out after reading the white paper that ACHI is enabled on the RAID setting in the bios (it says RAID: Raid, ACHI enabled). So in my infinite wisdom instead of creating a volume in the bios raid setup, I didn't select anything and BOOM, booted into xp.

But now I have a new problem.

After updating my HD controller driver to the intel raid driver, intel matrix storage console now says that I can create a raid array. So what do I do? I go to create one and it says "array creation has failed" after hanging for about 30 seconds.

Boo.

Also, if it is of any help, windows Disk Management does NOT see any of the 4 drives that Intel storage manager console does. I suspect this is natural because they're on the raid controller now, maybe.

Any thoughts at this point as to why it wont let me select the 4 drives to create an array?

Anyone? TTT