Totally lost....Booting Windows 10 out of two SSD's (sm961) in RAID0

[iamgenius]

Hi to all.

I think this is the best place I should put this. I also posted this on [H]. I want a solution so badly.

System Configuration is as follows:

i7 7700K @5.1 GHz on ASUS Maximus extreme IX formula
64 GB of ripjaws RAM
ASUS Strix 1080
Seasonic PRIME 850 Watts PSU
Thermaltake core X9 case

Now comes the disks. I have one 5TB WD drive for data. One 512GB samsung 850 Pro SSD. And one 512GB sm961 (The oem version of the samsung 960 pro ) where windows 10 pro is installed.

What I thought would be a very straightforward process turned out to be otherwise. The minute I decided to add another sm961 pro into my mobo to create a RAID0 volume and migrate my windows installation into it, my nightmare started. I haven't experienced this boot problems in my entire 20 years life of building PC's. Here is what I did:

I installed Macrium Reflect in my windows drive and created an image of the whole OS drive and saved it externally somewhere. I then went into the UEFI BIOS ( I must say I hate this one, used to be much easier), changed the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID and created my ~1TB RAID0 volume. I then booted into my bootable Macrium reflect drive, located my saved image and started looking for my raid volume. Unfortunately, Reflect didn't detect my raid array. I went through some trouble to get it to see it (loading Intel rapid storage driver) and then did what's expected. Load the image into my newly created ~ 1TB raid volume, the thing which I thought everything will be fine after. BUT NO, the PC couldn't boot. Nothing I do would fix it. I understand having multiple drives could confuse things but the boot order should take care of this in the BIOS.

One thing I should mention is the stupid way they have now to create the RAID volume. I don't see an option for it in the advanced PCH menu. Maybe only after I disabled CSM and rebooting I was able to see something. But, even then I can't find it sometimes, to recreate or delete the raid volume. The only way to access it is the EZ tunning wizard!!! What?! Why!?

Before in normal BIOS I remember, you can freely switch back and forth very easily. You will lose your data. So, if you don't have data to lose then it is fine. I must be lost in the EFI and UEFI BIOS, CSM, and secure boot stuff. I think the problem resides here somewhere.

I also don't seem to be able to really break the raid array because when I change the mode and change back to RAID, I can still see the volume created....why? Anybody has this mobo and tried to run RAID0 with his M.2 drives? Please say yes.

Anyways, instead of booting into windows I get all kinds of BSOD:

-restart or advanced options (F8 and the rest)
-inaccessible boot device
-the PC couldn't start
-Run startup repair or troubleshoot using a device

....etc . Nothing helps of course

Note:

-I was once able to use my bootable windows 10 drive and install a fresh windows installation into the raid0 after the loading the raid driver. This should work but I don't want to go through the countless configurations and installations I did, plus I don't seem to be able to do it anymore because the windows bootable drive doesn't see the RAID volume. I don't know why.

- I can also install windows into one of the other drives and boot to it, but that's not what I want of course. When I do this, I can see the raid volume. I also tried loading the image to it from withing windows but it still didn't work.

Any tips, hints, comments, instructions, guides will be greatly appreciated. I'm really sorry of the language because I'm little mad at myself and at the UEFI BIOS.

I can provide more info if you want. Thanks.

 

[iamgenius]

As a side note: I just noticed that I lost my overclock(I rebooted like 40 times playing with), although the values are still the same in the UEFI BIOS! What gives? I can recover it, but why would such a thing happen? Even loading the saved profile didn't fix it. Stupid. Sorry, but I'm still mad

 

[VirtualLarry]

Seems pretty clear to me. The backup image of your existing Windows OS, was not prepared with the BIOS set to RAID, and the RAID drivers already loaded. So that when you restore the OS image using Reflect to the RAID array, and then try to boot it, it pukes.

 

[vailr]

Macrium Reflect isn't probably smart enough to do what you're attempting.
There are also specific bios settings required to get bootable NVMe Raid working.
Search youtube videos for "NVMe raid" for those bios settings.
This video uses a similar Asus motherboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxYUg-IBvBc
I'm thinking: CSM disabled, GPT disk format are 2 requirements.
You may need to make one bios change, then re-boot, then go into bios settings again, and make a second settings change.
So: once the bios settings are corrected, boot from the Windows installation USB drive, and then fresh GPT format & install Windows, with only the two NVMe drives connected to power.
Note: the Windows installation USB thumb drive should also be formatted in GPT mode. If it was configured in MBR mode, it won't work. There's free software "Rufus" that allows selecting GPT mode, when creating the bootable USB drive (using an .iso file of Windows 10).

 

[iamgenius]

Well, I just gave up. It doesn't seem it will ever work even with the redeploy option of reflect. I also tried acronis true image. No go. Acronis had three types of bootable media. I miss the nice days of Norton ghost. I just went back and Re-installed windows from scratch and loaded the RAID driver at the very beginning. I'm in the process now of installing apps and doing configurations to my taste.

I know RAID0 isn't probably worth it, but for some benchmarking numbers it is nice!

 

[iamgenius]

Again, I agree RAID0 isn't worth the trouble with my case, but numbers look nice in benchmarks. Here are some for your viewing pleasure:

And my passmark rating:

 

[Ratman6161]

The 960 pro is far and away the fastest consultative on the market and your 961 should be pretty close to it. Putting that drive an a RAID array with any SATA drive, even an 850pro is crippling the 961. A complete waste even if you got it to work. The 961 would constantly be waiting on the SATA drive, basically flushing performance down the toilet.

 

[vailr]

@ Ratman6161 : the O.P. was talking about dual NVMe drives in a raid array.
The ASUS Maximus extreme IX formula has 2 NVMe slots.
There exists some motherboards with as many as 5 NVMe slots.

 

[davidm71]

Hi to the Op,

I just went through what you went through but had success in the end after a very long day of trying to get it to work. Let me just start by saying I have a Z170-WS board and tried to raid two SM961 M.2 drives together. First thing you need to be aware of is if you clone one drive onto another and leave the other one still hooked up you will get a disk signature collision issue and BSOD if you try to boot the new drive or array. Anyhow on my system I already had a sata raid array as a slave and had the Intel Rst driver + console already installed.

So I started with Acronis 2016 and the default emergency boot usb disk failed to boot. So I created a Win-PE version of the Acronis boot disk and that loaded but could not see the nvme array. Maybe because it didn’t have the right raid drivers installed. Anyhow creating the nvme array was another ordeal because I had modded my bios to use the 15.9 raid efi driver and that raid cration utility refused to create or see the SM961 drives. I had to flash the last official release that had just come out with 15.5 efi raid driver. Then turn on Raid mode again, enable raid control of each m.2 port, and disable CSM. After this step the 15.5 raid utility worked and I created the nvme array.

Anyhow because Acronis failed to see the array I ended up using Macrium Reflect and got to say it was a great experience. The whole interface and menu structure was so much more logical than Acronis. Furthermore the emergence boot disk process shows you what drivers its grabbing from your installation and lets you even use alternate drivers if you want. So I rebooted with Macrium and lo and behold it saw the nvme array and restored the disk. Theres even an option to troubleshoot boot issues in there I didnt have to use.

So at the end of the day I got it working. Only thing is the performance in respect to read speeds wasnt much better than a single drive considering I topped out at 3200 mb/s which is not only the rated read speed of each drive but the dmi max throughput allowed. Write speeds doubled though maxing out the interface. So I would suggest you not give up and try again!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Seems pretty clear to me. The backup image of your existing Windows OS, was not prepared with the BIOS set to RAID, and the RAID drivers already loaded. So that when you restore the OS image using Reflect to the RAID array, and then try to boot it, it pukes.

Yes. Exactly what I was going to post. Converting from AHCI to RAID for just a single drive involves about two or three small changes to windows registry -- (do I remember this correctly?) -- and is documented at more than one web-site (like Windows 7 Forums) and such well-known expert-bloggers as Paul Thurrot. Look for it and you will find it. That would be the very first step. there is also a "Fix-It" on the Windows or Microsoft TechNet, Knowledgebase or similar sites and forums. But even with the FixIt, you still have to reboot and enter BIOS immediately to change storage mode to the target mode, then allow to continue into boot.

I was also thinking that once you got an original disk converted to successful boot into RAID, you wouldn't really need to clone or restore from image.

Instead, you would simply add another disk in the controller BIOS to make a 2-drve RAID0, and it should rebuild from the original disk with the OS and distribute stripes across the array. This is the way I remember it, and anyone who can correct me will be also appreciated.