Intel ICH10 "matrix storage" RAID woes...

[Grall]

I bought two WD Raptor 1TB HDDs today - probably a waste of money, but shit, I haven't bought anything for my PC for ages and ages now and I wanted something to play around with. The plan was to use the built-in chipset RAID to stripe the two drives as a replacement for my current 2TB 7200RPM desktop drive, but I kind of hit a snag there.

...Bluescreen snag.

Manual sez: enter BIOS setup and configure the disks as [RAID] (instead of [AHCI] as they are now), then restart, hit CTRL-I to enter Matrix Storage Setup and create a RAID volume. I did that.

Afterwards I had to enter BIOS setup again to re-set my SSD as boot device, because it got lost in the shuffle somehow (I noticed that when the system would not boot at all), and after correcting that issue windows 7 64-bit immediately bluescreened when it started booting.

Upon rebooting the boot menu suggested I repair my installation, which I let it do. It told me the problem could not be repaired automatically. I shrugged, restarted again just to see what would happen, and of course it bluescreened again.

I changed everything back to the way it was, then used windows to create a software striped volume instead. I'm hoping this won't be a huge detriment to performance. Does anyone have any experience with windows' own software striping?

Also, what could be the cause of the bluescreening I experienced? Since disk repair started without problems and managed to scan my SSD also with no problems it's not that there was any real issue with actually booting. It has to be that windows did not like to suddenly find a new drive device that happened to be a RAID 0 volume present where there previously was no such device...

My mobo is an ASUS ROG Rampage II Gene, running 1501 BIOS. I noted there's now an updated 1701 version (for entirely geek reasons I totally approve of this number, lol), but I doubt it would make a difference considering how long this mobo has been out. Any storage matrix issues due to BIOS flaws ought to have been ironed out by now. Changenotes mention nothing about RAID stuff anyway.

 

[swaaye]

I think you need to install the Intel RAID (Rapid Storage) driver. Win7 doesn't have built-in drivers that fully work with Intel RAID mode on recent chipsets AFAIK.

 

[Grall]

I should have full Intel chipset support installed already, but... *shrug* You'd think windows would just complain if a driver was missing; not toally fall over itself and bluescreen.

Thank you for the suggestion; it might be worth checking out, it was a long time since I updated the chipset drivers and maybe something is missing. Will have to be tomorrow though, off to bed in a litle bit.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

This happens because Windows was installed with AHCI drivers. When you switch to RAID in the BIOS, Windows can't boot the drive in order to load the correct drivers because it's still trying to use the AHCI drivers - it can't get to the point of seeing the new hardware. There are some tricks you can do with two drives to make work if your motherboard has two controllers, or there is a registry key (and utilities to flip it) that you change before you switch to RAID.

And yes, you need to install Intel's Rapid Storage drivers to make it all work. I think current WHQL is 11.6.0.1030

 

[Davros]

is that really the case ?
since he is booting from an Ahci drive, the o/s doesnt need raid drivers installed to load the raid drivers because the raid drivers are not on the raid drives they are on a ahci drive
your describing the situation of switching from ahci to raid not of staying with ahci and adding raid (pedantry mode off)

ps:
http://www.askvg.com/how-to-change-...o-ahci-raid-in-bios-after-installing-windows/

the problem isnt windows cant access a drive to load drivers its, windows doesnt know it should be loading drivers because it doesnt check to see if any drive controllers have changed

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Windows fails because it's trying to boot off a RAID drive with AHCI drivers. It never gets far enough to enumerate new drivers (which happens after the boot process), hence the bluescreen crash: the low level disk driver has failed.

I fixed this myself a couple of years back just by swapping cables about and rebooting a couple of times. With two controllers, you can boot off one disk in AHCI and one on connected to RAID, so your boot disk can come up and then load drivers for the RAID disk. Then you switch settings in the BIOS and then everything works fine.

 

[green.pixel]

I bought two WD Raptor 1TB HDDs today - probably a waste of money, but shit, I haven't bought anything for my PC for ages and ages now and I wanted something to play around with. The plan was to use the built-in chipset RAID to stripe the two drives as a replacement for my current 2TB 7200RPM desktop drive

Sorry of the OT, but you sure are supporting consumerism.

 

[Davros]

A blue screen is a windows error message, and for a windows error message to appear windows must be booted or at least partially booted.
At this point you may be thinking which drive did it boot off
before you answer that question let me tell you you have 2 choices
1: a ahci ssd with windows on it
2: a raid array that is totally blank with absolutely nothing on it
what drive did the computer boot from ???

If the computer tried to boot off the raid array, he would get a bios error message, you would never see a windows error message because its impossible to boot into windows (even partially) from a drive that is blank
seeing a bsod means the computer is booting from the ssd since its the only drive that it can boot and load windows from once its started booting it wouldnt then try to boot from the raid array

edit: just realised you have a great defense against my rebuttal since your statement is contradictory

Windows fails because it's trying to boot off a RAID drive with AHCI drivers. It never gets far enough to enumerate new drivers (which happens after the boot process),

first you say its trying to boot from the array and crashes, then you say the boot process completed

It never gets far enough to enumerate new drivers (which happens after the boot process),

 

[Grall]

I only created a RAID volume on the two new (and entirely blank, I presume) raptor drives, but presumably all drives get treated as RAID devices somehow by the southbridge controller hardware, as there's no possibility to enable RAID only for particular SATA ports/attached drives... It's either none, or all. Maybe that's significant enough of a change to cause windows to crap itself I dunno.

Still, as you observed Davros, it still manages to boot far enough to throw up a bluescreen, so there really shouldn't be a problem here if MS had only done its job properly... I'm unsure though if any drives without RAID volumes on it get treated as AHCI if you enable RAIDing in the BIOS, and since Intel recommends AHCI for my SSD I will stick to windows software striping for now.

I did a test copy of large data files (belonging to World of Warcraft incidentally) from the SSD to the software RAID array and the speed averaged about 220MB/s and no significant CPU impact, so I guess performance-wise I'm good. Maybe there's additional CPU overhead for small transfers, but since HDDs are so abysmally slow in such situation I doubt I'll be bottlenecked in any way.