ASRock 990FX Extreme 4: Setting up raid drives.

[gigman]

Can someone tell me how I'm suppose to setup my raid array's in this BRAND NEW ASROCK 990FX EXTREME4 MB bios? My drives are detected but when I go into the raid bios by pressing CTRL F, I can't do anything. Its say no LDs??????? Do I need to RMA this board?

[bahram_alinezhad]

It has:
"6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by AMD SB950, support RAID"
and
"2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Marvell SE9120"
which does not support RAID. Check to which ports have you connected your drives.

[bjbaker]

Hi. First post. Please be gentle.

I am building a system around a 990FX Extreme4 and FX8150. I have connected a pair of 500GB disks to ports 1&2. I have connected four 3TB drives to ports 3-6. In the UEFI setup menu under the storage setup I have set the SATA mode to RAID. I have set the Onboard 3TB+ RAID unlocker option to UEFI mode for GPT partition. That one is where you see the instructions for setting up the RAID drives. I set the IDE Combined Mode option to disabled to enable ports 5&6 to be used for RAID.
To set up the RAID drives get into the UEFI shell command line and type drvcfg which will give a display something like
Configurable options
Drv[44] Ctrl[FB] Lang[ENG]
So then you put in
drvcfg -s 44 FB (substituting the "handles" displayed on your system)
That gets you into the RAID configuration menu. In there I successfully added LD1 which is a RAID1 array comprised of the two 500GB disks and LD2 which is a RAID5 array of the four 3TB disks.

I started to install Windows 7 Professional. That didn't see any drives. So I added the drivers from the CD and the list of drives that resulted is somewhat confusing. It shows 5 drives, with the 4th one being the 500GB volume and the others as 3TB volumes. I powered off and then disabled the 3TB drives figuring I would sort them out after I got an operating system going. When I started the windows installation again and loaded the drivers I saw just the 500GB volume and created a primary partition on it. But I can't install windows as it says the system can't boot from this drive. It tells me I have to enable the controller for this in the BIOS to let it be set up as a boot device.

At this point I am stymied. When I look at the boot options in the UEFI setup menu the RAID devices are not presented as options. I am wondering if there is magic required in the UEFI shell to enable the RAID drives to be seen by the BIOS. But the online help scroills off the screen to goto really fast. Scroll lock and ^S have no effect.

Anyone know where I go from here?

Regards,
Bruce

[bahram_alinezhad]

Some professionals correct me if something is wrong!

A raid array defined in bios is nothing more than a software raid. A software raid is controlled by a driver in memory. Before OS, it is controlled by bios. When you install an operating system, 2 states may occur:

1- The OS does not need specific driver for each chipset and accepts bios controller (like DOS and Win98). Here the raid array created by bios works well.
2- You install an OS which needs taking the control of each chipset by itself (like WinXP, 7, Linux). You have to specify a driver to replace the bios procedure, else, the array either isn't recognized or it's disks are seen separately.

With the above explanation, it is better to define raid arrays inside your OS and forget about bios. For such a software raid defined inside os (not the bios) you have better flexibility and performance.
The only tricky part is when you want to install the OS itself on a raid array. In this case a raid should be defined during os installation and its boot manager should be able to recognize it as well to make boot from it. I know it is possible for linux and for windows should be too.
Another way is using a real hardware raid controller in which case, all array entries are hidden from OS and a single raid drive is present. Such raid chips usually exist on server boards or add-on raid cards.

[Acebmxer]

Well sorta. You can still have hardware add in cards and be software raid. To be true hardware raid the controller hard has to have its on cpu and memory/cache to handle all IO requests. While software raid/raid cards use your systems CPU and ram to handle the processing.

It is best to define raid arrays in the controllers bios you can then use software when in side the OS to manage the controller/array afterwards.

windows vista/7 should have Intel raid drivers built into the OS so you do not have to press F6 to install drivers, I am not sure about AMD's raid.

If you use Disk Management to use Dynamic disks and create a raid array you are using Software raid built into windows.

If you looking for a true hardware raid controller that can do raid 0,1,10 I suggest looking at the IBM 1015, It is a rebranded LSI9240-8i with out raid5. It can be picked up from ebay for around 60-90$. I currently am using the LSI 9240-4i which is the same but with only 1 port which supports 4 drives.

[bjbaker]

Anyone know where I go from here?

Apparently not. I tried ASRock support and got no response there either. I got tired of waiting for helpful suggestions and continued my own research.

I found that in the UEFI the magic required to see the first part of the help list is help -b (apparently -b is for break. Obviously not an obvious to a native English speaker). Having access to those help options didn't help me solve my problem.

I have now changed the Onboard 3TB+ RAID unlocker option to Legacy MBR. Since I'm not planning to boot from the 9TB RAID5 array I'm hoping all will be well. That changed the UEFI setup options to give me the option of the RAID arrays as bootable devices. It also resulted in the ROM RAID setup function becoming available again via ^F during POST.

So now it installs Windows 7 to the point where it reboots into the final phase of the configuration and gets stuck in that. I left it alone for half a hour to be sure it was stuck. There's nowhere to go. If I reset it will boot up but say that I need to restart the installation since it was stopped abnormally.

Not delighted.

[bahram_alinezhad]

Sorry; My mainboard has not UEFI and I cannot exactly comment about it; But as far as I know, with UEFI bioses, There is an extra space on mainboard in which the OS can put its boot manager. If you install your windows in UEFI mode, it puts its boot manager on that extra space instead of Master Boot Record (MBR) of hard disk. So, if you can manage to install your windows in normal mode over your raid array, it should be possible to install it in UEFI mode too without problem.

[bjbaker]

Updated the BIOS to 1.6
Inserted a spare IDE disk to try an O/S installation that doesn't require RAID drivers..
Tried both Windows 7 Pro, and Windows 7 Ultimate. Both hung (repeatedly) while finalising installation. Not happy. I can't get Windows 7 to install, even with a simplified configuration. I'm approaching the point of writing off this MB and trying another brand. The lack of response from the ASRock support email I sent last week is helping to drive that reaction.

[bjbaker]

Gave up on ASRock. Ordered an ASUS Sabertooth as a replacement.

[bahram_alinezhad]

ASUS boards are not ideal also; But I hope your success.