Hi everyone, With Win-XP and Vista, you are required to install the RAID & AHCI driver(s) as a first step before installing the OS, which makes sense since the older OS needs to know the Volume it is being installed on. The GA-P55A-UD7 Gigabyte instruction book manual doesn't mention anything about the installation sequence with Windows 7 (32 or 64 bit), even though Windows 7 was released before the P55A-UD7 MB. Does Windows 7 have the Intel IRST and JM36X (& other) RAID/IHCI drivers available at the front end of its installation process, so you wouldn't have to go thru the Ctrl I (Floppy Disc) F6 business before installing the OS, or is it still just the same disjointed process as before?
I know the Marvel RAID/IHCI drivers can be installed after the OS is functioning, which is nice, but I probably would never use it in a RAID configuration since that controller is for the 2 SATA 6 Gb/s ports. Much has been made of Seven's 'native' support of AHCI, but I've yet to find any definitive documentation on which controllers are actually supported. Doesn't mean the info doesn't exist - just haven't found it yet! Haven't seen a quarter of the 7 devkit contents yet, maybe 10% of the DDK - and have a new TechNet doc update that I haven't even burned to DVD yet, much less installed. Assumptions have been that at least the two major player's bridges/controllers are covered, Intel and AMD; Marvell seems not to be; jMicron - haven't found anything yet. I don't want to hijack this thread but theres no sense in starting a new one. I have the ga-x58a-udr3 mobo.
I've been trying to get raid 0 to work with windows 7, using the ICH10R raid controller. When I build the array with the raid bios and then boot into Win7 it sees the array but says it can't install on it.
So I installed it on a single drive then used Intel's utility to convert the system to a raid array after the OS was installed. After waiting 14 hours for that to migrate my data for the raid array, I rebooted and it said the raid array was (status: normal) although it was (bootable: no) UGH WTF?!?! I looked on the gigabyte website for ICH10R windows 7 drivers and all they have is some.exe file. I want the raw driver files so I can load them while installing the OS. For reference I'm using two if these drives to make a raid array: (2TB model) I heard that using 2tb hard-drives can cause some difficulties but I have no idea. Honestly I'm even willing to go to XP as long as I can get these two drives working in raid 0 using the ICH10R controller. I'll have to see what, if anything, Intel recommends.
Official Gigabyte SATA RAID/AHCI Drivers download center, download the latest Gigabyte SATA RAID/AHCI drivers in no time!
In general, an array bigger than 2TB has to rely on: either changing the sector size from standard 512 to 4K, which makes the maximum volume capacity 16TB - option works under Windows only, and it CAN NOT be converted to Dynamic Disk, because 4K is not a standard sector size; or LBA 64, using a 16 byte CDB instead original 10byte - LBA64 is the standard method for addressing a device with over 2TB capacity, and allows volume capacity up to 512TB. This option works on different OS which support 16byte CDB, such as Windows 2003 with SP1 or later and Linux kernel 2.6.x or later. I'm not positive offhand - will have to dig a bit, but I'm thinking neither method allows the partition to be bootable. The The x86 & x64 set are the 'pre-load' driver sets; the ALLOS thing is the OS manager.
I'll have to see what, if anything, Intel recommends. In general, an array bigger than 2TB has to rely on: either changing the sector size from standard 512 to 4K, which makes the maximum volume capacity 16TB - option works under Windows only, and it CAN NOT be converted to Dynamic Disk, because 4K is not a standard sector size; or LBA 64, using a 16 byte CDB instead original 10byte - LBA64 is the standard method for addressing a device with over 2TB capacity, and allows volume capacity up to 512TB. This option works on different OS which support 16byte CDB, such as Windows 2003 with SP1 or later and Linux kernel 2.6.x or later. I'm not positive offhand - will have to dig a bit, but I'm thinking neither method allows the partition to be bootable. The The x86 & x64 set are the 'pre-load' driver sets; the ALLOS thing is the OS manager. Ok I guess this is more on the right track for me. I'm not an expert in raid, is changing the sector size something I can do in the raid bios while setting up the raid array?
I'm more or less looking for a step by step for getting raid on my mobo with windows 7, I've wasted around 20+ hours on this and have almost given up. OK - found a bit. First, booting from > 2Tb disks is only possible on systems with UEFI instead of BIOS, and there are only a handful of those - mostly server boards. Small article from MS on GPT format How-to on doing either GPT or LBA64 in windoze in this I assume you're getting 'through the basics'; entering the RAID BIOS to set up arrays, know how to load the 'pre-load' driver? If you need help with either, I'm pretty sure I've posted some procedures recently, I'll just need to find them.
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