Making a RAID card unbootable

[skyman66]

Hello,

For some reason, my motherboard (Asus P8Z77 WS) will not boot to the drives with windows on them whenever there are drives connected to the RAID card (Highpoint 2720SGL).

It always magically makes the RAID card have boot priority, even if i boot to my windows drives through the bios and even with the priority set up in the bios. I flashed the RAID card bios, updated the firmware, software, etc.

If there are no drives connected to the RAID card, it boots into windows fine. I checked every setting in the bios and there's nothing to fix it. I checked every setting in the RAID management software.

The only way I can access the drives on the RAID card is if I have them unplugged until after I boot into windows, which is silly.

Any tips from experience?

Thanks.

i7 3770k
GTX 680
2x 60gb SSD on mobo RAID
3x 3tb HDD on RAID card

 

[alzan]

I'm not familiar with the Highpoint cards but:

If you haven't already, see if in BIOS you can take the Highpoint card out of the detected boot devices list; if you can, do so, save and reboot.

On the LSI cards I've worked with there are options to Detect the card in OS/n BIOS/in BIOS & OS/No detection. I know you said you checked but it may have been overlooked. I didn't see it on the LSI's until my third time through, and it was on the second config. utility screen.

If possible, see if you can relocate the card to a different PCIe slot on your mobo. BIOS may be default booting to the card because of the slot's priority.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head

 

[skyman66]

Thanks Alzan.

I moved the RAID card to the middle PCIE slot, and it was the same, but I'll try to see if i can take it out of the detected boot device list, as you said.

EDIT: That didn't quite work. I disabled it and it shows nowhere in the boot priority...but it still does the same thing, taking priority while booting into windows.

The RAID software just has 1 page of system settings and it's not there.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some RAID cards have a utility (usually DOS, although nowadays it's probably Windows too), that flashes a small portion of the card's BIOS, such that it doesn't hook the boot interrupt any more.