No announcement yet.

Setting up RAID 1 on FM2A88M Pro3+

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Setting up RAID 1 on FM2A88M Pro3+

    I am trying to setup raid on my media server and have one drive (SATA 1) be the drive for the OS and have two 4TB drives (SATA 7 & 8) be the Raid 1 for Mirroring to protect data loss. I have tried the easy raid installer, comes up with error message every time no matter what the SATA is set to, I have tried different USB drives as well. I have configured it in more ways than I can think of and have had no luck at all. Any info would be very helpful. The mobo doesn't see my CD-ROM when in RAID mode either, so installing the RAID drive from the cd has only been possible in IDE mode. Than i loaded the driver onto my OS drive, and now I cannot get it to load windows on it at all, getting error -0x80300024, so now I can add that to the problems. Again, any info would be very helpful, thanks for your time and input!

  • #2
    Re: Setting up RAID 1 on FM2A88M Pro3+

    Using RAID on AMD boards is different with the new AMD chipsets, like your A88X chipset. Have you read the RAID installation manual for your board:

    http://download.asrock.com/manual/ra...3+/English.pdf

    You must follow the instructions carefully, or you'll have problems. The process has changed and become more difficult.

    The most basic requirement for using RAID is installing Windows with the SATA mode set to RAID. You cannot change to RAID mode after installing Windows in IDE or AHCI mode, it won't work, you cannot get around that. If you installed Windows in another mode, you must start again.

    Your board's SATA ports can be configured for some to support RAID, and others for IDE combined mode. Doing that would allow you to use the CD ROM drive as long as it is connected to the correct SATA port. SATA ports 7 and 8 may be the IDE combined mode ports, so not for use with RAID.

    You don't really need a CD ROM drive to install the AMD "SATA Floppy Image" RAID driver, a USB flash drive should work fine during the Windows Load Driver option, that is available when you select a Custom Installation. The USB flash drive must be inserted into a USB 2.0 port on the board's IO panel, none of the other USB ports are guaranteed to work.

    Since you are not installing Windows on a RAID array, you do not need to create the RAID array when installing Windows. But you may need to format the OS drive as GPT so it will be able to access the RAID 1 array on the two 4TB drives, that also must be formatted as GPT.

    It is very important to not have any other drives connected to the PC (really just connected to power) when you install Windows. Otherwise Windows will put the MBR/GPT partition on another drive besides the target OS drive. That is a quirk of the Windows installer, and cannot be ignored. When you later create the RAID array with the other drives, the MBR/GPT partition will be over written, and the PC will no longer boot.

    Once Windows is installed in RAID mode, with the appropriate RAID driver installed during the installation, then you can create the RAID 1 array. Note the special instructions for using drives greater than 2.2TB, as you are using, they must be formatted as GPT, not MBR. The RAID installation manual describes how to do this.

    I can't stress strongly enough that you MUST follow the instructions in the RAID installation manual. That does not mean reading them for the first time while you install Windows, you must know what you will be doing before you start.

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Setting up RAID 1 on FM2A88M Pro3+

      I have just installed windows with it in RAID mode and the 2 4tb drives are still unallocated. I have tried to go into the uefi shell after the install and done drvdfg and it is showing no drives that it can configure. I cam unable to log into Raidxpert2, it is saying 'License Level 0 - No RAID(does not support RAIDXpert2)'. Any help is very much appreciated.

      Edit: They are already GPT as well, but still cant manage to get them to set up, not sure how to go about setting up the drives after windows is installed.

      Comment

      Working...
      X