Won't boot unless SATA in bios is RAID (Intel RST)

[sep]

I have a P8Z68 motherboard that I had a 128GB SSD setup for Caching and OS. The install was done by setting up the BIOS to SATA=RAID and installing Intel's RST drivers.

I successfully cloned the drive to an Intel 330 240GB drive and no longer use the caching. However I can only boot with the bios set to SATA=RAID.

How can I get this back to AHCI? Will I see a performance gain going back to AHCI?

Can I uninstall the Intel RST software?

 

[postmortemIA]

which os? sounds like you have xp.

 

[sep]

Ugh...I forgot that I took all this out of my signature when HTC gave it to me up the @#$.

I'm running Win7 Pro.

I read somewhere online that it looks like Windows is looking for RAID vs IDE/ACHI. That I might be able to change a registry setting to make it accept the ACHI vs RAID. Does this sound right?

 

[mv2devnull]

That sounds right.

Every device (vendor+model) has an unique ID(entifier). The OS loads a driver that claims to handle that ID. The IDE, AHCI, and RAID modes have different ID for obvious reasons. Windows 7 does have a driver for each
[*], but by default "the other two" are disabled (a "do not consider this" flag in registry is on) during install. They can be made "available" via Windows Registry. (Example here.)

IDE and AHCI are two "languages" that controller can talk to disks. RAID is an additional feature for multi-disk juggling, but the controller talks AHCI to each disk and one can have single disks in RAID mode just fine.


[*] Both AMD and Intel ship drivers too, which may or may not be more refined than the Microsoft's implementations.

 

[sep]

mv2devnul thanks for the information.

I updated the registry, but still can't get away from "Intel(R) Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller".

I want to go back to MS AHCI without reinstalling my OS.

 

[sep]

Please help....I'm going crazy here with Intel's RST. I want to use MS AHCI and disable DIPM due to freezes with the new Intel SSD 330 240GB drive

 

[sep]

Well I found the problem with the pausing...it was my usb hub (Rosewill usb3) used for keyboard/mouse...DOH! Drive is running smooth.

I'm able to enable all three options. However I can only successfully boot when the bios is setup to RAID. Any ideas?

 

[Auric]

Should be able to simply "Update Driver" for the controller in Device Manager and pick either Standard AHCI (generic Microsoft) or Intel AHCI which is preferred. The latter may require browsing to an unpacked driver if not installed previously (that mode). Then reboot and switch BIOS mode from RAID to AHCI. Then reinstall RST package for good measure.

If RST was uninstalled it would probably revert to MS driver but cannot be sure of AHCI since not selecting specifically and of course BIOS still in RAID mode in order to be in Windows in the first place.

 

[mv2devnull]

My guess is -- like Auric hinted -- that the Intel RST driver attempts to take over in AHCI mode but gets confused by something (maybe its config expects RAID). Removing Intel driver should let the MS driver to step in.

Creation of RAID array writes the definition of the array (aka metadata) into each drive. The Intel caching is no traditional RAID array, but I assume it does something similar. Disabling the caching should logically erase the metadata. "Should" is a word that supposedly should not be used in computing.

 

[murphyc]

I am not familiar with this particular motherboard and its BIOS setup. But IMST will conflict with a separate SATA card that supports a RAID option. If you have both configured to do RAID, it will cause corruption and problems. By the sound of it though, this is on-board SATA on an Intel motherboard that supports IMST in which case I'd like to believe no conflict is possible.

The way IMST works, is at a firmware level it doesn't present the physical drives to the operating system, but rather presents the logical volumes (the array or arrays) as physical drives to the operating system. However, the board nor firmware actually do any RAID, that's handled by the IMST driver. So it's functionally software RAID. But for it to be bootable, the array volume needs to be presented as a physical disk (spoofed if you will) to the OS.

IMSM metadata is found at the end of all disks, causing a ~3200 sector offset. So if you were to GPT partition the resulting array (which you would need to if any array volume is > 2TB) the GPT alternate header is found at the end of the logical volume (the array) not the physical disk.

 

[techs]

I came to this thread via the Post your AS SSD thread.

My question is does your bios have separate settings for ide, ahci and raid? Some mobo's only have IDE and RAID modes, with the RAID mode being AHCI when there is either no second disk or that particular mobo doesn't support raid but the bios is also used on boards that do support raid.

In other words, if there are only IDE and Raid modes in the bios, the RAID mode is really AHCI.

 

[mv2devnull]

The way IMST works, is at a firmware level it doesn't present the physical drives to the operating system, but rather presents the logical volumes (the array or arrays) as physical drives to the operating system.

I have to disagree with that a bit. GRUB -- a bootloader -- does see the physical drives directly, rather than one logical RAID-1 array. Linux -- a full OS -- does see the physical drives directly, notices that they do contain RAID-1 metadata and then assembles the logical array device. Only the Windows hides from them user (but Intel's Windows management tool does not) that there are physical drives.

It might be that the firmware assists the loading of Windows a bit more, when the array is a RAID-0, and therefore there is all the mind-boggling juggling with the striped chunks, that one simply cannot cope with without proper hard/firm/soft implementation.

 

[murphyc]

I have to disagree with that a bit. GRUB -- a bootloader -- does see the physical drives directly, rather than one logical RAID-1 array.

Yep, you're right. And since I don't have a motherboard with IMSM I can't test the firmware's behavior. What I can say is that for either Windows or Linux IMSM RAID 1, the on-disk data is identical to non-RAID except for the IMSM metadata at the end of the disks. So this allows either physical disk to initially perform the booting without any assistance from the firmware. With Windows it may work differently, there's some indication when googling that the firmware may not be active at all for Linux booting.

Further it may work differently between different RAID levels.

It might be that the firmware assists the loading of Windows a bit more, when the array is a RAID-0, and therefore there is all the mind-boggling juggling with the striped chunks, that one simply cannot cope with without proper hard/firm/soft implementation.

Yeah I'm not sure the RAID 0/10/5 case is even supportable under Linux for booting. I haven't tried it.

 

[sep]

Bios has all three options, IDE - AHCI - RAID. The only way I can boot is RAID.