Raid disk not visible during Vista 64 bit installation

[BeastFromTheEast]

I'm just posting this to hopefully save someone else the time and frustration that I went through...

I was building a new system based on an ASUS P5E3 Premium (which uses the ICH9R for RAID) and decided to use 4 750GB hard drives that I recently bought for about $100 each. I configured the system for RAID in the BIOS and set up a RAID 0 using all 4 drives in Intel Matrix Storage Manager (yes, I know that may seem strange but I have good reasons for going RAID 0). All was well....until I started my installation of Vista 64-bit.

When I got to the point where it asks where I want to install the OS, it didn't show any hard drives. It was my understanding that you don't need separate RAID drivers for Vista like you do with XP, but I went ahead and got the latest version and loaded these off a CD (it was nice that Vista doesn't require you to load drivers only from floppy by the way). Still nothing.

I did a lot of researching on problems with setting up RAID under Vista and XP...anything from which sata slots are used, to using the alternate SATA chip on the MB, to problems with the brand of hard drives, the amount of memory installed etc. Finally, once I had a huge list of complex "fixes" to try I came across a guide for setting up RAID with VISTA which luckily had screenshots of each step (great guide by the way). It was on the Intel Matrix Storage Manager screen that I noticed a subtle difference between their screenshot and mine...their RAID volume had Yes in the Bootable column unlike mine!

Finally it dawned on me that VISTA was probably only showing Bootable RAID volumes/disks in the "Where to install" screen. I then guessed (correctly) that there must be a problem due to the size of my RAID volume. Without getting into all the details, after a little research I found that there was a 2 TB limit for bootable volumes. I broke my big 3 TB RAID 0 into 2 smaller 1.5 TB RAID 0s and much to my delight, IMSM now showed both RAID volumes as Bootable. This in turn caused them to be visible to Vista 64bit during install. The rest of the install was very smooth and the system runs great!

Anyway, with capacities of hard drives shooting up as prices drop, I figure more and more people will be hitting this limit. So again to summarize, if you are having problems getting Vista or Windows XP to recognize your RAID volume, it may be because the size is greater than 2 TB! Hope this helps someone!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, there is a 2TB limit on standard partition types. You have to use Dynamic Disks to get bigger partition sizes than that, but those are only recognizable within windows, not to the BIOS.

 

[RebateMonger]

You might find that having two 1.5 TB volumes is a good idea anyway. If you ever have to run something like Chkdsk /r on a 1 TB or larger array, you'll find that it's a "bit" time-consuming.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Yes, there is a 2TB limit on standard partition types. You have to use Dynamic Disks to get bigger partition sizes than that, but those are only recognizable within windows, not to the BIOS.

EFI and GUID can't come soon enough.

 

[Nothinman]

It was my understanding that you don't need separate RAID drivers for Vista like you do with XP

Nothing's changed in this respect. You don't need drivers if the RAID controller is supported out of the box in Vista, just like with XP, but otherwise you do.

 

[initialised]

I did a 4x750GB RAID-0 on an EVGA 790i, both 32-bit and 64-bit vista saw is as a 2048GB and 748GB array. So I guess this is more than a driver level limitation. Hopefully nVidia, JMicron, Intel and ATi will update MS with new drivers for SP2 to support >2TB arrays. Until then I guess we will have to make do with soft raid (Dynamic discs) on spilt RAID volumes until then.

Also I did have to load a driver from the EVGA disc to get it to see the array.

I dropped it to two 1.5TB arrays.