I have three 250GB Hitachi SATA drives. I'm trying to create a Matrix array using two of the drives (with a RAID1 and RAID0 volume spread accross them) and have Windows on the third single drive.

Windows is already installed on the single drive, but I setup the array fine and left the single drive as "non raid disk" in the setup, then made sure that disk was the bootable disk in the BIOS. Indeed in the Intel facility, all three drives are shown and the two arrays are active. However Windows starts to load fine but crashes with a BSOD!!!! Doh!!!!!!

When I had a two disk array next to a single disk on an Nforce4 controller, I had to manually set the two sata ports to RAID and leave the other as IDE/SATA. I can't do that here.

Now seeing as Windows partially loads I can't see the single drive with the OS on it has been incorrectly set up. I can select it in the BIOS as a single RAID disk which is a bit odd, but is found ok and as I say Windows starts to load. If I disable RAID in the bios and revert it to SATA then Windows boots fine but now of course the RAID array is gone.


Anyone have any ideas? Do you think reinstalling Windows after setting up the array might fix things?

When the BIOS selector is in IDE mode, a different driver is used than when the selector is in RAID mode. When you installed Windows you were in IDE mode, so the IDE driver was loaded.

When you switched to RAID mode, Windows now doesn't have a driver to start up with, resulting in the blue screen stop error 0x0000007B.

You can fix this in one of two ways:

1. Set the BIOS to RAID mode, and reinstall Windows on the single drive. You will have to have a floppy with the RAID driver on it, and load the driver during Windows text-mode setup using F6.

2. Set the BIOS to IDE mode so that Windows can start. Then follow the procedure in the sticky thread located at the top of the hard disk forum: FAQ: Switching Storage Controllers without Reinstalling Windows.