RAID Volume not recognized

[Kiteman]

Hi All,

I have an EP45-UD3R with XP Pro installed on a single Raptor drive. The drive is connected to one of the GSATA ports. After the installation of XP I purchased 3x 1TB drives and 1x 1.5 TB drive which are now connected to the Intel SATA ports. I set up the BIOS and configured the drives with RAID5. Everything look fine except one thing: XP doesn't see the RAID volume in the disk manager. It does appear in the device manager though, and the Intel Storage Manager also recognizes it. I initialized the volume but still on appearance in the disk manager. Any idea why?

[gampamu]

Partition/format the volume and you should be good to go. Right click over the Volume description of the RAID (xxxxGB Unallocated) in the Disk Management and click New Partition ...

[Capt Proton]

Read the OPs post. He can't see it in Disk Management, therfore he cannot format or partition.

OP, have you rebooted? You do need to reboot after the OS installs new hardware.

[Kiteman]

You're correct, I am not able to see the volume, so no way of formatting it. I rebooted the PC numerous times, no impact. I also tried to delete the volume and recreate it with the Intel Storage Manager instead of the BIOS. Didn't make a difference though.
Even though I would hate, hate, hate to do it, I'm considering reinstalling the OS from scratch as a last option....

[gampamu]

I am puzzled. If you can't see the volume at all in the Disk management, how did you initialize it?

[Acebmxer]

did you install the latest drivers motherboard_driver_sataraid_intel and Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager 8.9.0.1023 WHQL

[Kiteman]

Yes, I did install the latest drivers. Btw, the drives were initialized by ISM by right-clicking on the RAID volume and choosing 'Verify'. I received a message saying that the drives weren't initialized and then was prompted to click the ok button for initializing.

Meanwhile, I attempted a reinstall of XP and provided the drivers during the F6 sequence. Interestingly, XP indicated that it needed to install something on the RAID volume before it could install the OS on the Raptor drive. There is something funky going on when using both sets of SATA ports. In another attempt, I disabled the Intel ports in the BIOS and installed XP on the Raptor. Afterwards I re-enabled them and created the RAID. However, the system was not able to go past the 'Updating DMI..." message. I was only to get past the message when I disabled the chip again. Go figure ....

[artdrivers]

You may want to set the Partition size to 2TB
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946557

On my research I have found that Windows XPpro 32bit has a 2TB limit.

If you want to make an array >2TB you need a 64-bit LBA Raid controller and an operating system that support GPT.

You may want to check out GPT partitioning.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...e/GPT_FAQ.mspx

[Kiteman]

artdrivers, I thought the same thing and because I intend to store more than 2 GB on that RAID, I decided to use Vista. And wouldn't you know, it works! Even with the drivers provided on the CD.

It appears that enabling the Intel chip after having installed the OS on a drive connected to one of the Gigabyte ports corrupts the start-up process. I'm not that much of a techie but it seems to me that disk 0 is associated with the Intel chipset rather than the GB one which is needed for the boot process. Since the files are missing (they weren't copied during the initial OS installation) , the system won't boot. While there may be a way to manipulate the MBR on that disk, I only got it to work by reinstalling the OS from scratch. I did not try a repair; maybe that would have fixed it but I just wanted to get this to work. In either case, this is not a straight-forward process by any means. On a side note, during the installation Vista also asked for disk 0 to be used for storing start-up files, just like XP did. So my guess is that even XP would have properly installed the RAID but the 2TB limit lead me to Vista.

At any rate, if somebody runs into the same situation, I hope this will give you some pointers. Good luck, and thanks to all for your help! This forum rocks!!!