Win7, ASRock 870, and RAID 1

[Doromb]

I have 3 Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS connected to my ASRock 870 motherboard with an AMD SB850. I installed Windows 7 on one drive in IDE mode, and now I want to set up the other 2 as a RAID1. When I change my SATA controller to RAID in BIOS, Windows will get about 3 seconds into startup and then crash. Is it possible to have a motherboard RAID set up with my OS installed on a single disk?

UPDATE: Tried to reinstall Windows using a bootable USB drive. Setup couldn't see any hard drives, nor could it find any drivers for my hardware on the USB. Do I need to find a separate RAID driver package?

 

[monza]

I have 3 Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS connected to my ASRock 870 motherboard with an AMD SB850. I installed Windows 7 on one drive in IDE mode, and now I want to set up the other 2 as a RAID1. When I change my SATA controller to RAID in BIOS, Windows will get about 3 seconds into startup and then crash. Is it possible to have a motherboard RAID set up with my OS installed on a single disk?

UPDATE: Tried to reinstall Windows using a bootable USB drive. Setup couldn't see any hard drives, nor could it find any drivers for my hardware on the USB. Do I need to find a separate RAID driver package?

I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but you can't change the SATA controller type on your boot drive. You need to enable dual SATA mode in the BIOS (RAID+IDE) and plug the boot disk into port SATA3_5. Then, you can setup raid on ports SATA3_1-4. Just be sure to set the primary boot disk to SATA3_5.

 

[Doromb]

I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but you can't change the SATA controller type on your boot drive. You need to enable dual SATA mode in the BIOS (RAID+IDE) and plug the boot disk into port SATA3_5. Then, you can setup raid on ports SATA3_1-4. Just be sure to set the primary boot disk to SATA3_5.

Thanks monza. I eventually figured that out, after plenty of trial and error. I've had this rig running for about 5 months now, with the only stability issue being occasional random reboots. I think that's due to a faulty boot drive, but I can't prove it.

 

[Doromb]

Best answer selected by Doromb.