Rapid Storage Technology
Intel® RST, RAID
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Setting up RAID when OS is already installed

RussellG
Beginner
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I just upgraded my motherboard (ASRock z590 Taichi) and I'm trying to get it working with an existing RAID1 volume that was created on the previous motherboard (ASRock Z97 Extreme4). If I try to boot into Windows 10 with the SATA Mode in the BIOS set to "Intel RST Premium With Intel Optane System Acceleration (RAID Mode)", I get a blue screen error 0xC000000D. The only way I can get it to boot is to change the SATA Mode back to AHCI, but then the RAID volume is broken and the Intel RST software won't run in Windows.

I don't think this is a BCD problem though. I think the problem is that the BIOS doesn't see the drives at all when it's in RAID mode. If I boot to the Recovery Environment, open a command prompt, and run "diskpart", it doesn't see any disks at all until I manually load the RST driver. I think the same thing is happening at boot time but I don't know how to force it to load the RST driver before it attempts to boot Windows.

The strange thing is that switching from AHCI to RAID on a drive with an existing OS worked fine on the previous motherboard, and then I was able to use the Intel RST software after Windows booted up.

The normal advice is to create the RAID volume first by pressing Ctrl-I before Windows boots up, and then do a clean install of Windows. But I've already installed Windows and I specifically want to keep my current OS and Registry.

How can I boot with RAID mode using an existing OS?

Thanks,
Russell

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BrusC_Intel
Moderator
2,009 Views

Hello, RussellG.


Good day,


Thank you for posting on the Intel Community Support Forum.


We have a dedicated community section for Intel Rapid Storage Technology, I will move your thread there so it can be answered as soon as possible.


Best regards,


Bruce C.

Intel Customer Support Technician


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n_scott_pearson
Super User
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If RAID is enabled and the drives form an array, then the physical drives are not going to be visible; only the logical drives that have been created within the array are going to be visible. 

When you boot, if the image you are booting contains old RST drivers and these drivers are not associated with the array identifiers exposed by the array (as it appears on this chipset on this machine), then the array is not going to be seen (either).

I personally think that it is a very, very bad idea to attempt to use an image from a far removed processor/chipset generation on the current processor/chipset generations; there are just so many things that can go wrong. Further, the performance of the array is going to suck bigtime compared with what is otherwise possible. Get yourself a super-fast NVMe SSD and freshly install Windows 10 onto it. Then, after installing a modern version of RST, you can use the array for your (slower) data storage.

Hope this helps,

...S

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RussellG
Beginner
1,916 Views

Scott,

First, THANK YOU for your answer. After having multiple conversations in email and on the phone with tech support people from three different companies about this, your answer is the first one that finally made sense!

I had several problems going at once. I was dealing with a new motherboard, switching from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT, trying to keep an existing RAID boot volume, and trying to restore the data for the RAID volume from a backup that had to be restored in WinPE, which wasn't loading the network and storage drivers correctly. It was a nightmare trying to understand it all.

After reading your post, I realized a couple of things. First, that I finally had to give in on trying to keep the old RAID volume. I didn't realize that the RAID drives actually contained the old RAID drivers, but once you mentioned that, it explained several things I was seeing and I realized that I had to start over.

And second, that my original plan from 8 years ago to have the RAID volume on the boot drives was no longer the right way to go. It made sense with the way I was working back then, but your suggestion to use a super-fast NVMe SSD for a small Windows 10 boot drive, and then make the data drive be the RAID volume, made complete sense. It also greatly simplified things.

So that's exactly what I did. I bought a 500 GB NVMe, installed Windows 10 from scratch on it, reinstalled the few things that needed to be on that drive, and now I'm in the process of replacing my big data drive with two new (much faster, but still rotational) drives that I'll put into a RAID1 volume.

So again, thanks for your help! It completely changed the way I was going about the problem, and finally helped me move forward.

Russell

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n_scott_pearson
Super User
1,882 Views

You're welcome. Enjoy!

...S

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