Boot Windows 10 from a RAID card?

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K

keke27

Commendable
Sep 3, 2016
6
0
1,520
Hello Everyone!

I have a Dawicontrol RAID card. This one:
http://www.dawicontrol.com/flyer/fl_dc-624eraid.pdf

When booting, I see ithe card's own BIOS, and, when entering, I can set up easily anything, RAID 0, 1, 5, JBOD, drive imaging, drive copying etc. Seems to be a good card for its money.

However, I am unable to run Windows 10 from it. For the sake of simplicity, I had only 1 SSD connected to the RAID card.

In the machine's UEFI BIOS (ASUS P8Z77-V LK, latest BIOS) CSM is enabled, and, underneath it, I set everything to "UEFI only". (This is the current state, I have tried other settings, except disabling the CSM.) Windows 10 setup runs from pendrive. During setup, I install the Dawicontrol RAID Win10 driver from CD, then the setup sees the connected SSD perfectly. Files get copied, the usual restart comes, and then - nothing. The new Windows is not available in the list of startup options.

What is going on here? What is needed for a Windows that is connected to a RAID card (which, by the way, is seen and used by the Windows 10 setup) to be put on the startup options' list? What am I missing here?

I thank you for your help in advance.

Bests,
Laszlo
 
Solution
K
Okay, so I had to dive in this UEFI thing. The card is not UEFI compliant. In the bios I had to enable Legacy OpROM for "Boot Device Control", and it worked. As I had the Win 10 installer on a pendrive, it is important that I had to launch it NON-UEFI mode (same installer, but 2 modes). When it got installed in non-UEFI mode, the card booted ans worked nicely. (With a speed tradeoff, of course.) It is important to note that booting anything (Windows or installer) in UEFI mode is a significant speed increase. Even the installation is slower in non-UEFI, and Windows itself boots slower in non-UEFI mode, from the card. But it works.

Thank you.

P.S. I used RAID for years. Daily backups are far better. This is my little advice. Today...
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A

Alabalcho

Titan
Jan 13, 2011
14,019
435
76,290
There might be a myriad of reasons, and I would contact the RAID card' support with your question.

But installing OS on strange RAID controller is (very) bad idea, for the simple fact that recovering the OS will be very very hard. You have already SSD - use it as system drive, and use RAID only for storage.
 
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K

keke27

Commendable
Sep 3, 2016
6
0
1,520
Okay, so I had to dive in this UEFI thing. The card is not UEFI compliant. In the bios I had to enable Legacy OpROM for "Boot Device Control", and it worked. As I had the Win 10 installer on a pendrive, it is important that I had to launch it NON-UEFI mode (same installer, but 2 modes). When it got installed in non-UEFI mode, the card booted ans worked nicely. (With a speed tradeoff, of course.) It is important to note that booting anything (Windows or installer) in UEFI mode is a significant speed increase. Even the installation is slower in non-UEFI, and Windows itself boots slower in non-UEFI mode, from the card. But it works.

Thank you.

P.S. I used RAID for years. Daily backups are far better. This is my little advice. Today backups softwares are great, running in the background, you don't notice a thing. And they protect you against scenarios that RAID would never do.
 
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